Maybe upgrade or install ASCII 

Linux devuan 4.5.0-2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.5.5-1 (2016-05-29) x86_64 GNU/Linux

then compress the modules folder to a file, & save that plus vmlinuz & initrd.gz to an external drive.

It is not popular to have just the necessary of Vmlinz and initrd.gz without the long procedure ... rather long deb or installing.... ?

Well, how to save at least 1 hour (instead of taking the usual installation procedure)

Basically <5-6 steps for painless installation:
1) syslinux or grub boot loader (10 seconds) with dd and then fdisk
2) vmlinuz + initrd.gz to /boot (30 sec)
3) copying modules to /lib/modules (1 minute)
4) debootstrap (3-5 minutes max.) depending on the internet connection
5) empty root (*) into shadow before reboot
6) For instance, apt-get install gcc xinit make xterm ssh gcc libx11-dev tinywm wdm  ntpdate  xserver-xorg w3m vim libncurses5-dev htop
Just done within just 10 minutes on a i7 machine 

why not this way also? It saves quite a lot of time.

Linux devuan 4.5.0-2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.5.5-1 (2016-05-29) x86_64 GNU/Linux

then compress the modules folder to a file, & save that plus vmlinuz & initrd.gz to an external drive.

Hello

Tired to compile and compile endless? Wanna save some time?

For x86 machines, would you possibly link us to a good kernel >4.5.x initrd.gz + vmlinuz + modules.tar.gz ?

Let's skip the deb thing. Minimal install is the directory modules, initrd.gz + vmlinuz.

Would you a good one ?

Thank you very much