For newbies its a bad news, since they have to compile new drivers but for free software supporters it a big news. One of the most popular GNU/Linux distribution is coming out with a completely free kernel. For users who are forced to install non-free ones because of the non existence of free ones, Debian will be providing a non-free section. But this comes with lesser support as the source code is not available.

1) The current Linux source code is always available in both a complete tarball and an incremental patch from the official home of the Linux kernel, http://www.kernel.org.

2) Extract the kernel source to /usr/src/ directory. The kernel tarball is distributed in both GNU zip (gzip) and bzip2 format. Bzip2 is the default and preferred format, as it generally compresses quite a bit better than gzip. The Linux kernel tarball in bzip2 format is named linux-x.y.z.tar.bz2, where x.y.z is the version of that particular release of the kernel source. After downloading the source, uncompressing and untarring it is simple. If your tarball is compressed with bzip2, run

# tar -xvjf linux-x.y.z.tar.bz2