Hi,
On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 21:50 +0200, Niki Kovacs wrote:
days, maybe weeks. If not months. Right now for example, I have to rebuild my kernel - to enable one option (VESA) and disable one other (SMP, which causes the system to freeze with the rt61 driver).
You should know that rebuilding the kernel is strongly discouraged (and unsupported). If a driver freezes the kernel, we should preferably get the driver fixed.
A very good thing to do would be to provide source RPM packages for various drivers. I don't know exactly if this is feasible, but let me give you an example. To install and configure an RT2500 wireless card with Debian, all you have to do is this:
The RPMForge source packages are available, but this is not what you want. Dag has provided some nifty dkms driver packages. These packages compile a module for the running kernel post-install, and after booting a new kernel (e.g. after a kernel update). No more manual module compilation is necessary. While it may not be the preferred option for servers, I certainly like it elsewhere.
# apt-get install module-assistant # module-assistant prepare --> this fetches all the tools necessary for compilation # apt-get install rt2500-source # module-assistant auto-install rt2500-source --> builds the module as a .deb package and installs it for the running kernel # modprobe rt2500 # ifconfig -a Etcetera... dead easy. (Well, no, dead easy is Ubuntu that already *has* all these modules available by default :o/ )
How about
yum install nvidia-x11-drv or yum install dkms-ipw3945
? to name just two examples. Seems less cumbersome to me :).
--Daniel