Howto: Compile and package Linux kernel 3.4.7

Compiling kernel - and packaging it the Debian way -

The latest stable Linux kernel is 3.4.7

Prerequisites:

The user should belong to group src and the following packages should be installed:
wget tar bzip2 build-essential libncurses-dev kernel-package fakeroot

Compiling and packaging:

cd /usr/src/
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.0/linux-3.4.7.tar.bz2
tar jxvf linux-3.4.7.tar.bz2
cp /boot/config-$(uname -r) /usr/src/linux-3.4.7/.config
cd linux-3.4.7; make menuconfig
make-kpkg clean
fakeroot make-kpkg --initrd --revision=custom.1.0 kernel_image kernel-headers
sudo dpkg -i ../linux-image-3.4.7_custom.1.0_i386.deb

Tips:

To optimize your kernel further you might like to try make localmodconfig instead ofmake menuconfig, it should strip unused modules from your kernel config.
Caution: unplugged devices won't have support in kernel anymore.

If your machine has multiple cores you might also want to add the following line to/etc/kernel-pkg.conf before compiling:

CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=3   ##LEVEL can be set to number of cores x2