I just started using Voyage MPD last week and quite like it, except for one flaw I've found: building kernel modules for proprietary drivers. The only problem I'm having (and this is not a voyage issue, I had the same problem when I ran Debian stable) is that my wired NIC, which is a lovely Realtek 8111/8168 series controller, uses the problematic r8169 kernel module. The r8169 module is effectively broke for my NIC and causes it to up/down the link randomly and drop a lot of incoming packets. Obviously this is not acceptable and I need to fix it. The accepted fix at this time is to use the r8168 module provided by Realtek. Realtek provides the "source" for this driver on their web site to be compiled as a kernel module and there's also an r8168-dkms package in the Debian sid repos.
So far I've had no success compiling the r8168 module from the Realtek tarball or from the DKMS package out of sid (all deps are satisfied for that package). I've installed the kernel source for the 3.0.0-voyage kernel, untarred it to /usr/src/linux-source-3.0.0-voyage and symlinked /usr/src/linux to it, but DKMS consistently claims that it doesn't think the source for the kernel is installed when I run `dpkg-reconfigure r8168-dkms`. I've tried compiling the module directly from the Realtek source via their autorun.sh script, but it looks in /lib/modules/3.0.0-voyage/build for something that isn't there (not too sure what *should* be there even, I've tried symlinking the kernel sources there but that doesn't work either). I've never had this much trouble trying to compile a kernel module before, especially in Debian. I searched my configured apt repos (squeeze, sid and voyage) for available kernel headers and couldn't find one for the voyage kernel (why isn't one available by default? that seems odd, especially so since you're offering a kernel source package) since you really don't need the full source tree available to compile a module in most cases. I did find what looks like a kernel headers package in the voyage experimental repository for the 3.0.0-voyage kernel. But I have to ask: why is the headers package for the default voyage kernel considered experimental? Will that package allow me to compile modules against the headers it contains or are there some known issues with it? So my main question here is: How is one supposed to compile a third party/out-of-tree kernel module on voyage for the voyage kernel? Any help is appreciated on this topic. Jon _______________________________________________ Voyage-linux mailing list [email protected] http://list.voyage.hk/mailman/listinfo/voyage-linux
