[NTLUG:Discuss] Kernel module woes.

[Lance Simmons]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 04:19:22PM -0500, Brian wrote:
> Beware of processes pitched by distros that attempt to "help" by
> making the most mundane tasks complex and opaque.

I find Debian's package management tools in general helpful and well
thought-out, and make-kpkg particularly so. "make-kpkg kernel_image" and
"dpkg -i <kernel-image>" (dpkg runs a script that automates updating
lilo or grub) makes it simpler to try out new kernels. It's still
important to know how to do all the steps independently, I think, but I
don't miss doing every step by hand.
 
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 11:16:02AM -0700, Scott Denlinger wrote:
> > I recently set up a Debian Woody box using the 2.4 kernel boot
> > flavor specified in the setup disks. I have a QIC tape drive in
> > this, so I thought I would install Ftape, and compile and install it
> > as a kernel module. 

Did you check the config file of the original kernel to see if the
required module was available already? The config file is in
/boot/config-<version> (though that may have been replaced by the config
file of the kernel you created).
 
> > It appears that in order to do this, it was necessary for me to
> > recompile my kernel, 

If you're going to recompile, it can be a good idea to copy the config
file of a working kernel into the kernel source directory, and then do
"make oldconfig". That will ask you about any options that weren't
specified in the earlier config file. Then you can make the additional
changes you want by doing make menuconfig or make xconfig.

If you're creating a new kernel with the same version number as your old
one, you can keep the new one from deleting the old one by saying
"make-kpkg --append_to_version=<whatever-you-want> kernel_image" instead
of just "make-kpkg kernel_image". 

-- 
 .~.
 /V\   Lance Simmons
/( )\  lance at lsimmons.net
^^-^^