Wireless

Fritz Whittington f.whittington at att.net
Mon Oct 11 18:14:58 UTC 2004


On or about 2004-10-11 11:31, Filippos Klironomos whipped out a trusty 
#2 pencil and scribbled:

>>Perhaps I didn't install
>>Linux correctly, I upgraded from RH9 and used the laptop installation.
>>Also, as I see the services loading at startup I can see my pcmcia slot
>>recognized as a YENTA socket so the pcmcia services must be working
>>somewere!  
>>    
>>
>
>Ok, So the kernel is one thing and the kernel source is another. The
>kernel is the vimlinuz file under /boot directory. This is the brains
>of the operating system. But when you want to download the source of
>some package and compile it manually you have to have the kernel
>source as well properly configured!
>
>The easy way is to see if they have precompiled versions of the
>drivers matching your kernel. That way you can just install those and
>save yourself the hasle. If this is not an option you should download
>the kernel-source, configure it and run it for a few seconds so the
>'linux/version.h' headers are created. Then break out of the process
>(since I assume you don't want to build your own kernel) and then
>proceed with the compilation of your driver. It should work this time.
>
>Notice that the step of configuring the kernel is non trivial and
>beyond this little tutorial here! You can find many good tutorials all
>around on how to do that especially for the 2.6 kernel series.
>
>Good luck!
>  
>
Certainly sound advice.  I will provide a little more detail in case it 
is helpful.

1)  run this command from a console:
$ uname -r
You should get back a response that looks something like:
2.6.8-1.521
*For the rest of these instructions, I'm going to use the "2.6.8-1.521" 
as the example.   If your system returns with a different kernel 
version, then substitute that in the places below where I have 
"2.6.8-1.521".*

Use Google or whatever to search the Web for 
"kernel-sourcecode-2.6.8-1.521" + Fedora + rpm.  You should find a 
number of places to download the file:  
kernel-sourcecode-2.6.8-1.521.noarch.rpm.  Download it, put it in a 
directory somewhere (say /tmp/stuff) and do:

$ cd /tmp/stuff
$ rpm -iv *.rpm

Then try:

$ cd /usr/src/linux

(Note that it's a lowercase "l", not uppercase "L" as you have in your 
email.)

If you get an error message that this directory does not exist, then do:

$ ln -s /usr/src/linux-2.6.8-1.521 /usr/src/linux
In either case, do:
$ cd /usr/src/linux
$ cd configs
$ cp kernel-2.6.8-i686.config ../.config
$ cd ..
$ make gconfig
(This should compile and then execute a graphical configuration 
program.  If it fails, then the error messages should be posted.  It's 
possible that you don't have the software development packages 
installed, and you'll certainly have to do that before you can go any 
farther.)

You can browse around and look at the options, but I suggest that you 
don't change anything.  Click on File-->Save and then File-->Quit.

You are now ready to cd to the directory where you extracted the 
tarball, and run the ./configure program, and follow the instructions 
from there.

-- 
Fritz Whittington
TI Alum - http://www.tialumni.org




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