[NCLUG] Fedora 6 and the RaLink rt2500 wireless card

Chad Perrin perrin at apotheon.com
Sun Dec 10 17:25:03 MST 2006


On Sun, Dec 10, 2006 at 02:50:33PM -0700, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> > Kevin Fenzi wrote:
> > > That's different. Even in Debian on a kernel upgrade all the drivers
> > > must be recompiled against the new kernel. This is why it's so nice to
> > > have a driver thats in the mainstream kernel... it's automagically
> > > updated when the kernel is and breakage is noticed right away. 
> 
> Yep.
> 
> > . . . unless your OS has a software management system that provides
> > decent support for installation from source.  I'm pretty sure that
> > Debian (via "apt-get source" et cetera), Gentoo, and FreeBSD will
> > manage that sort of thing for you when installing from source, and
> > upgrading kernels, via their default software management systems.
> 
> On Debian you still have to actually do it and so that is manual.
> Having the ability to do it does not make it automatic.
> 
> On Debian I can 'apt-get install linux-image-X.Y.Z' or 'apt-get
> dist-upgrade' and get kernel packages trivially.  But any custom
> compiled modules I will need to recompile myself even if I have the
> source to them.  The nvidia driver is a good example of this problem.
> A lot of people like module-assistent for this (although I don't like
> it personally) but that still means you need to do an external action
> in addition to installing the new kernel.

I referred to using the software management system's integral
compilation tools, not just grabbing sources off freshmeat and doing a
"./configure;make;make install".  I recall installing ndiswrapper from
deb-src repository sources, grabbed with "apt-get source -b" and
installed via APT, that upgraded along with the rest of the installed
packages when I ran an "apt-get upgrade" later on.  I'm not certain
whether this works in concert with kernel upgrades, since I've not
really tried that, but it does work when there's a new minor version
release, security patch, or bugfix available in the deb-src repositories
for what I've installed from source in that manner.

>From what you've said, it sounds like you're talking about needing to
recompile when you install from source outside of the APT system, which
is to me at least pretty much a tautology.  It's also not really
relevant to what I said, if that's what you meant.  Did I misunderstand
you?

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
"A script is what you give the actors.  A program
is what you give the audience." - Larry Wall



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