Re: atmalwlandriver, 2.6 kernel and Debian

[Brent Miller <unraveled@sbcglobal.net>]

Lorenzo Prince wrote:

>I have an 11wave WaveBuddy PCMCIA wireless network card, and I want to use it
>with the 2.6.6-1-686 kernel on Debian Sid.  I have the kernel-source-2.6 package
>and hav untarred it and symlinked the resulting directory to
>/usr/src/linux-2.6.6-1-686, which is apparently where it is expecting to find the
>kernel source.  However, whenever I try to build the driver, I get about a
>million errors from headers in the kernel source, including redeclarations,
>unknown types and parse errors.  Obviously these errors can't be real, because
>if they were, one would never be able to even compile the kernel.  This driver
>doesn't require that I compile the kernel, just that I have the source installed.
>I am trying to use the latest version of the atmelwlandriver package as found at
>http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net
>Actually, it's the latest snapshot, which still shouldn't cause these problems,
>as they seem to be kernel related.  If anyone has gotten this driver to compile
>correctly with a 2.6 kernel on Debian, please let me know how you did it.
>
>Thanks,
>PRINCE
>  
>

While I must admit I've never tried to build that module, so I can't
really say for sure if it's your problem, but it looks like you're
missing a step in the build process.

Generally when you build modules against a kernel source you need to
'configure' the kernel source tree to your configuration. It's been a
while since I've done this and I'm doing this off the top of my head so
this may not be perfect, but hopefully it will set you in the right
direction.

First, you need to make sure you have the "make-kpkg" package. After
that, you need to copy the /boot/config-"your-kernel-version-here" to
".config" in your kernel source tree.

Then do a cat /proc/version You're looking for the string that
immediately follows your kernel version. For example on my system it
reports:
Linux version 2.6.6-1-k7 .....
You're looking for the -1-k7 part.

Now cd to the kernel source tree and do a "make-kpkg --append-to-version
"-1-k7" configure" Of course, replace -1-k7 with whatever is appropriate
for your system.

If all goes well you should have a properly configured kernel source
tree and should be able to build modules against it.

HTH,
Brent