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Re: How to get started




On May 28, 2006, at 3:23 PM, Stephen Gran wrote:

This one time, at band camp, Daniel R. Killoran,Ph.D. said:
I have just installed Debian on a Copmaq Presario 5070, but my
ethernet card was not recognized. I have a manufacturer-provided
driver for it, but I only have the source, so I must compile it and
connect it to the system.

The make file calls for gcc and some other software, so I have to
install those first, but so far I have not even been able to find the
"make" module in the mess of packages that are provided. Isn't there
some kind of meta-install package that will install the software you
need to compile and link a driver?

For future reference, the mailing list debian- user@lists.debian.org is probably better suited to these sorts of queries. This is a mostly dead list (that I guess I had forgotten I was still subscribed to) designed
for discussions about the toolchain itself.

All that being said, there is a meta-package, build-essential, which
should get you most of what you need to build kernel modules.  After
that, you'll need the kernel-headers-$(uname -r) package.  If
build-essential does not for some reason install make, the package is
named, perhaps too obviously, make.


Many thanks, all of you, but:

Neither aptitude, apt-get, nor dselect seem to recognize "build- essential"
(Most of them say "No candidate version" or some such message.)
I can't find it in the screen version of aptitude, either.

I did find it by searching the Debian website, but it is a -.deb file.
Should I download that on my G4, write it to a CD (what format? ISO?) and load it (how?) onto the Presario? (Remember, I can't download directly, since the ethernet card doesn't work yet, which is the object of this excercise!)


Hey, I'm almost out of the woods!

It turned out that my install was incomplete, and for your future reference, here is how it happened:

After the first part of the install is over, the installer instructs you to remove the boot CD so you can boot from the newly-installed (but incomplete) system on the hard disk. A bit later, it tells you to add other programs by scanning the extra disks.
It didn't occur to me that you should START with the BOOT DISK!
So I started with the one that identifies itself as "Binary-2"!
But you don't actually see this, because it flashes on the screen and then is overwritten by the dialog box.
So I blithely scanned disks 2-14 and the updates.
Now when you do this, the install is crippled in a peculiar way - it THINKS all is well, but never gets around to actually INSTALLING the extra programs! If you do it right, you get to baby-sit it all afternoon, and end up with the binaries you need!

So many thanks, and maybe there ought to be a cautionary note in the manual!



So I continued trying to create my driver, and got as far as the "make", which went looking for:

/lib/modules/2.6.8-2-386/build

and couldn't find it! The message was

Linux kernal source not found

Is it looking for the kernel-headers-$(uname -r) package you mentioned? If so, is that on the binary disks, or do I have to douwload the kernel sources?


TIA,

Dan Killoran



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