On 12/04/13 19:46, Rowan Berkeley wrote:
On 12/04/13 19:31, Jim Price wrote:
On 12/04/13 13:38, Rowan Berkeley wrote:
It's interesting that you mention a shell script there, because I have
become very fond of my Compaq laptop, even though every time it gets a
kernel update I have to reinstall the wireless driver, and I have been
thinking that it ought to be possible to automate the reinstallation.
This is as far as I can think it through: at each startup the script
should check whether wireless is running, and if not it should grab the
driver package (kept in the home folder), and do make, make install, and
modprobe on it. How easy would that be?
A framework for that already exists. It's called DKMS. Here's the Ubuntu
help doc on it:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DKMS
Thanks, in fact I looked at that once before but decided it was a bit
over my head. I can see it's the right answer, though.
I agree. It could use a script or GUI frontend which prompted you for
the location of the source, any config scripts etc. and then set up and
checked the mechanism for you. It would make sense if it was aimed at
being a tool you use for third party drivers on first install anyway,
and might be suitable as an extension for jockey. Currently being DKMS
aware seems to be the responsibility of the packager, and packaging
makes assumptions that what is being packaged is under the complete
control of the distribution, which isn't the case for externally
provided drivers. Who knows, making the process of adding external
drivers straightforward might encourage more manufacturers to provide
drivers in the first place - especially if a format for them were
published and all you had to do was stick to that to make it all
automatic across a range of distributions. All that sort of exists now,
but not in a way the inexperienced would easily come across or be able
to use if they did.
--
JimP
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