There are some useful options you can pass to make during the kernel
compilation:
make O=/directory/ (saves the result of the compilation in given
directory; this is particularly useful if you do not want to litter the
kernel source directory with *.o files, but in that case you should
also use ''make O=/directory/ menuconfig'' instead of
''make menuconfig'' and
''make O=/katalog/ modules_install'' etc.)
make CC=<compiler> (allows you to specify the name of the
compiler to use; for example, in Debian there are several versions of
gcc, and if you want to use gcc-3.4 to compile the kernel it is
sufficient to use ''make CC=gcc-3.4'')
make C=1 (before compilation the kernel sources are checked by the
sparse tool)
make -j<number> (sets the number of parallel processes that will be
run during the kernel compilation)
make xconfig (graphical configuration using Qt)
make gconfig (graphical configuration using GTK+)