[CentOS] CentOS 5 and Broadcom wireless

[Dag Wieers]

On Sat, 12 May 2007, Bart Schaefer wrote:

> On 5/12/07, Daniel de Kok <danieldk at pobox.com> wrote:
> >
> > It may be useful to know that (normally) DKMS packages will
> > automatically compile the module post-install, and after each kernel
> > update.
> 
> Hrm.   Well, that didn't seem to happen with ndiswrapper, because
> after installing it there was no trace of a kernel module that I could
> find.  However, perhaps I missed some other manual step.  I'll try
> again.  Any guesses about what I might have forgotten to do?

One of the current problems with DKMS in RPMforge is that we provide dkms 
packages that are dist-agnostic (so they appear for all dists). However 
the source-code may not work with a newer (or older) kernel.

This obviously is problematic. The easiest way to solve this is to add 
kernel dependencies to what is known to work, but yum cannot handle this 
situation as it only considers the most recent package.

The other solution is to repackage the same dkms-module only for the 
distributions that ship with a kernel it works against. But this of course 
may break when kernels get replaced by upstream.

For CentOS5 and ndiswrapper, I can confirm it works, I just did this:

	[root at rhun ~]# apt-get install dkms-ndiswrapper
	Reading Package Lists... Done
	Building Dependency Tree... Done
	The following NEW packages will be installed:
	  dkms-ndiswrapper
	0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 removed and 0 not upgraded.
	Need to get 209kB of archives.
	After unpacking 796kB of additional disk space will be used.
	Get:1 http://apt.sw.be redhat/el5/en/i386/dag/ dkms-ndiswrapper 1.38-1.el5.rf [209kB]
	Fetched 209kB in 0s (223kB/s)     
	Committing changes...
	Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
	   1:dkms-ndiswrapper       ########################################### [100%]
	Done.

	[root at rhun ~]# dkms status
	ndiswrapper, 1.38-1.el5.rf, 2.6.18-8.1.3.el5, i686: installed 
	madwifi, 0.9.2.1-2.el5.rf, 2.6.18-8.1.3.el5, i686: installed 
	fuse, 2.6.3-1.nodist.rf, 2.6.18-8.1.3.el5, i686: installed 
	ntfs, 2.1.27-2.nodist.rf: added 
	kqemu, 1.3.0-0.1.pre11.nodist.rf, 2.6.18-8.1.3.el5, i686: installed 

>From this list you can see that the ntfs module is the only one that is 
not 'installed', because it failed to build against the kernel. The ntfs 
source-code in the dkms package is for a 2.6.20 or 2.6.21 kernel (FC6 or 
FC7). So instead of a nodist packages, this should be instead become an 
el5 package.

fuse however is designed to buid against 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, so the 
dkms-fuse packages is the perfect nodist example :)

I hope we can add more dkms packages in te future. It's not the most 
optimal solution for kernel modules (especially for servers), but you can 
binary build RPM kernel packages from a dkms-module to deploy on servers 
as well. So it is at least acceptable.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]