module-assistant/ndiswrapper/kernel-headers

Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 12:23:30PM -0800, Freddy Freeloader wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>
> hey. don't you wish this snow would quit hanging around?
>
>
>> I just rebuilt my laptop and am having problems getting ndiswrapper
>> installed. Module-assistant gives me an error saying I do not have the
>> correct kernel-headers package installed and fails to build
>> ndiswrapper. The problem is that there is no kernel-headers package
>> with the same exact package version as the installed kernel version.
>>
>> The installed kernel is reported as 2.6.18-3-486 by uname -a. The only
>> kernel headers package available with apt-get for Sid or Etch is
>> 2.6.18-6.
>> What would I file a bug report against? m-a or ndiswrapper?
>>
>
> huh. looks to me like we've just seen a kernel upgrade in sid from
> 2.6.18-3 to 2.6.18-4. you could either upgrade your kernel or try
> backports.debian.org and try and get it from there. Also apt-cache
> search shows that the common header files for 2.6.18-3 are still
> around, you might be able to use those.
>
> A
>
Snow? What snow? LOL. It's still cold down here, but the snow has
been gone for more than week here. We had a few days in the mid-30's
and that was enough to get rid of the snow we had, and we didn't get any
this last time it snowed up there.

Thanks for the heads up on the new images and headers. I was looking
for new images and headers, but was searching for kernel-image and
kernel-header, not linux-image and linux-header so nothing compatible
was showing up.

I'll be in town tomorrow so I may stop in for a few minutes.

--

Sven Arvidsson schrieb:
> On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 12:23 -0800, Freddy Freeloader wrote:
>> The problem is that there is no kernel-headers package
>> with the same exact package version as the installed kernel version.
>>
>> The installed kernel is reported as 2.6.18-3-486 by uname -a. The only
>> kernel headers package available with apt-get for Sid or Etch is 2.6.18-6.
>
> Are you sure you have both the linux-kernel-headers and the
> linux-headers-2.6.18-4-486 packages installed?
>

You know, just rtfm would do the trick.

# module-assistant update
# module-assistant prepare

This should fetch any files you need for building kernel modules,
including the headers. AFAIK it doesn't matter wether your headers are
x.y.z-a and the image installed is x.y.z.-b but just let module
assistant figure that out for you.

Then simplest would be to

# module-assitant auto-install ndiswrapper

but i don't know if it's really ndiswrapper and not ndis-wrapper or
something else, if unsure either check you /usr/src/modules directory or
simply call module-assistant without any commands and you'll be able to
select from a list.

Hope I could help, Roman.

--

Sven Arvidsson wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 12:23 -0800, Freddy Freeloader wrote:
>
>> The problem is that there is no kernel-headers package
>> with the same exact package version as the installed kernel version.
>>
>> The installed kernel is reported as 2.6.18-3-486 by uname -a. The only
>> kernel headers package available with apt-get for Sid or Etch is 2.6.18-6.
>>
>
> Are you sure you have both the linux-kernel-headers and the
> linux-headers-2.6.18-4-486 packages installed?
>
>
That was the solution. m-a apparently does not search for linux-header
or linux-image packages, it uses apt-get to search for kernel-headers
and kernel-image, or so it seems anyway. However, once I installed the
updated linux-image and linux-headers packages everything worked as it
should.

The problem probably stems from the fact that of the kernel choices that
the Etch installer makes available I chose the one that is not an
explicit choice of a kernel version. (I can't recall off the top of my
head what the choices are right now though. ) That probably keeps apt
from upgrading the kernel until that generic kernel package is updated
to the latest kernel image, and that doesn't seem to happen right away
as I ran apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, and even apt-get dist-upgrade
looking for new kernel packages and nothing showed up.

It wasn't until Andrew said that new kernel image and header packages
had been made available that I expanded my search to look for
linux-kernel and linux-header packages. If I had done that to start
with I wouldn't have had a problem. However, it just never occurred to
me to try that as I assumed that if anything was available m-a would
find it in the "prepare" routine run when setting up m-a.

--