Help with extremely basic ld linker script

[Thomas Nyberg <tomnyberg at gmail dot com>]

I'm writing an (extremely) simple boot sector. Right now my input 
assembly file is

boot.s
---------------------------
.section .kernel
.here:
    jmp .here

.skip 512 - 2 - (. - .here)

.byte 0x55
.byte 0xaa
---------------------------

I produce my boot sector by running the following commands:

> as boot.s -o boot.o
> objcopy -O binary --set-section-flags .kernel=alloc 
--only-section=.kernel boot.o boot.img

My use of objcopy is a little bizarre (imo), but essentially what it 
does is simply extract the literal .kernel section in the object file 
and write it to another file. This results in a 512 byte file which is a 
valid bootsector.

Now what I would like is to do this with a linker script. I've read 
different manuals and tried quite a few things, but kept running into 
issues. Is there an easy way to produce something equivalent to what my 
first method does? Thanks so much for any help!

Cheers,
Thomas