3.0 b3 Kernel header woes

  • reetp
Posted: Thu, 10/08/2009 - 22:55
Hi, Just been installing 3.0b3 on my sons machine as he is interested in mixing etc. This seemed to be one of the best things around and I thought I'd give the new version a blast first. I run linux on my desktop and some linux servers but I'm no expert - rarely compile anything. But I'm usually quite good at RTFM. Downloaded the DVD, burnt it, lobbed it in, fired it up, said OK a few times & made coffee & presto. All installed without fuss (as it normally is unless you want to install it on a Thinkpad). Everything seemed to work out of the box. Well. ALMOST everything. The one thing I did want to do was get his wireless card running - it's a standard (these days) rt61 / rt25xx based card. It's a stock driver and it should be there, or there should be an easy way to install it. It's where the fun began. I've now spent something like 5 hours on & off trying to sort this out. Currently go the 2.6.29-1-multimedia-686 kernel and that seems to be the cause of the problem. No module included. Read a load. OK, download the headers & source for the driver. Read a load more. Can't compile cos the headers are screwed. Read War & Peace. Sod it, I'll use ndiswrapper for the time being. Like hell I will.......... no module installed, can't compile the source. Kick the computer. Hard. Twice. Nope it's not a TV. Or a washing machine. It remains unperturbed. I've read & read & read, hacked apt sources, tried this, tried that & finally lost the plot. It seems there is no simple answer to this when there should be. It's a shame cos this looks really promising, but I currently feel like slitting my wrists ! I am fed up of trawling through forums, bug reports et al with nothing particularly easy to read. Wouldn't it be easier to lob a bit in the FAQ and keep it upto date ??? Much easier to read than forum posts lost in time. I could have spent 5 hours testing rather than 5 hours wasting my time ! Can someone please give me a bit of guidance on this. My son is itching to play, and so am I, bearing in mind my brother runs a small studio, I know a bit about it and would love to show him something that makes him look outside of the 'Windoze' box An up to date wiki page with If you install 3b3 then we recommend that you do the following..... In the meantime, I'm off to reinstall and try plan J2.4.79 - fortunately I included a large brandy in this particular plan..............
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Update - just so you

  • reetp
  • 10/08/09
  • Mon, 10/19/2009 - 08:48
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Update - just so you know. Upgraded to Ubuntu Intrepid and tried to install the deb for 8.10 Still wouldn't play - can't remember if I tried to compile from source - I think I did & got errors which is when I decided to do something different. Gave up & trashed the lot and installed Ubuntu Studio. Under the rt kernel the wireless would not play ball. Installed a stock kernel and away it goes. Obviously a problem with the rt61pci / rt25xx drivers somewhere along the way. Funny because it looked like the connection was up but the wireless couldn't see anything. Mixxx-1.7 Loads more fun. Tried the 8.10 deb Still wouldn't play. Their website says : "A flaw has been discovered in a library provided by Ubuntu 9.04 that can cause critical hangups in Mixxx. Ubuntu 9.04 users are advised to install the version of PortAudio from Ubuntu 8.10, available as .deb packages here:" This is the package they recommend : libportaudio2_19+svn20071207-0ubuntu3_i386.deb (The installation has libportaudio2_19+svn20071207-0ubuntu7_i386.deb installed) Installed that. Nope. Try to compile from source. Nope. Compile errors. Hmmm. Upgraded back to '7' which compiled fine but crashes. Downgraded to '3' and it works a treat ! No idea what's going on there but I guess I'll post a bug report or somesuch. Installed the Hercules drivers etc and now have working wireless AND mixxx-1.7.0 My boy is very happy....... I think that if it is to be included in 64studio, there will need to be some serious backporting going on........... You could probably stick with 1.6.1 but 1.7.0 was brought out to support more of the Hercules controllers and would be the better choice for hardware support IMHO. I'm sure a greater mind than mine would have it working in no time ! Will keep watching this distro as I think it's very good, but I can't use it until it supports my hardware properly. As I said in the first place, there is nothing particularly bleeding edge about the hardware so I am surprised it isn't supported.

Cheers Pablo ! Yes, I'm

  • reetp
  • 10/08/09
  • Wed, 10/14/2009 - 11:46
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Cheers Pablo ! Yes, I'm well versed with the vagaries of Linux - I run it on my desktop and the servers that I manage. But it is frustrating sometimes. Too many bright ideas pulling in too many different directions. Such is life. Anything rather than Windoze though ! I am just in the process of updating to Intrepid and will see what happens there. I agree he doesn't need state of the art rt kernels but it seems much more sensible to give him a good base distro and work from that. I'm also interested for my brother who runs a small rehearsal/recording studio and radio station at his local school. Been trying for ages to get him to try something like this, but for him, it just has to work out of the box with minimal fuss. Per this thread : http://www.64studio.com/node/904 "It will run from the Hardy repositories though for all but the cutting edge multimedia and 64 Studio related packages" I can't see how it can do both. Either you go for stable but older, or cutting edge but possibly less reliable, unless they are prepared to backport some packages such as Mixxx. I guess part of the problem is the long release/update cycle for the distro, undoubtedly due to the busy lives of the developers. The upshot is that you decide to base a distro on release X but by the time you have completed it, things have moved on massively. Not an easy problem to solve ! For me, it's the necessity to upgrade on particular package - everything else was absolutely fine. Anyway, I'll report back on developments for any others that might be on the same journey as me !

Re:Aaaarrrggggghhhhh

  • Pablo
  • 07/11/07
  • Wed, 10/14/2009 - 08:04
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Hi reetp! Lol :) Sometimes Liux can be very fustrating, I know. Well, I never looked back to Windows but distrohopping is a good idea. 64studio is a great distro, especially the community and their work with jack and the kernel (which are the base for a proffessional Linux studio) but it is still a beta and what's worse, it is based in ubuntu hardy, 08.04, you know that means it is a year and a half since they released the base distro.... (which means almost all software packages). That means, between other things, old libraries, which in turn means compiling state of the art programs is very difficult when not impossible. Well, all is posible in libre software but you won't want to divorce... Some time ago, I decided I wanted to be more up to date with applications as upstream developers are working a lot these days. And I decided ubuntu 8.04 couldn't be my base distribution, because I needed to compile apps which need newer libraries. If I have the libraries precompiled in the distro repos, compiling pograms is easy. If not, a nightmare. Really, aaargh! You learn very quickly but I think some readings you do are aimed at distributors, not end users. Some end users enjoy a lot with tweaking their systems and building their own Linux from scratch, but your son will enjoy more the apps than you enjoy the OS (although you are enjoying the OS a lot :). No jokes, I love GNU/Linux OS) Well, ubuntustudio jaunty has a bad rt kernel. But ubuntu generic is not as bad for audio work. If needed, you can install the kernel from the 64studio backports. But see, maybe your son doesn't need a linux-rt because the generic kernel is not as bad. I have a box with Linux Mint 7 (based on ubuntu jaunty) and it is fine for me even with jack (I did the tweak in the /etc/securitylimits.conf file and that's all. see jackaudio FAQ's. generic kernels are fine with realtime scheduling even if they are not optimised for it). I don't know if Mixx is a jackified app, but if your son likes computer music, jack is a must. Obviously, I am not a pro musician, I enjoy from time to time making music but what I like the most is trying apps. You both know what kind of applications you need, go for them from a good base, from a modern distro. ubuntu jaunty is fine. My two cents, Pablo

Aaaarrrggggghhhhh

  • reetp
  • 10/08/09
  • Tue, 10/13/2009 - 21:03
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Aaaarrrggggghhhhh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Installed 2.6.26 multimedia kernel & headers Complained it couldn't find the firmware for the wireless card but I solved that by dropping a copy in /lib/firmware OK. Now for Nvidia............ not a chance. Complaining it can't find the header files when I know they are there........... Finally solved. Just Envy. That sorted it. Then tried to upgrade to Mixxx 1.7 I just discovered that the deb they supply is compiled for 8.10 .............. needs libasound2 from Intrepid. OK, we'll compile it then. And that threw a whole load of errors which I still can't figure out & have posted in the Mixxx forum. Reason I wanted the newer version is that my son has a Hercules MP3 mix desk and stacks of MP3s and AFAIK Mixxx 1.7 supports both. (I did test on his 9.04 install that we replaced with 64Studio) I have to say that I am beginning to wonder why I ever bothered, my son is beginning to think I haven't got a clue what I talking about and why can't he just use windows, and my wife is wondering whether she'll ever see me again and is considering filing for divorce. Oh well........maybe some good will come out of all this :-) The box is a solid & reliable AMD 2000XP+ on a decent board, 1 Gb RAM, enough disk space, and a dreaded bog standard wireless card. But it's not exactly state of the art - the reason I decided to use it. It just SHOULDN'T be this difficult..........

Hi Pablo, thanks for the

  • reetp
  • 10/08/09
  • Tue, 10/13/2009 - 12:49
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Hi Pablo, thanks for the comments. 1. I must have missed 2.2.26 - I'll install it & try 2. I think with 2.6.29 I have the headers installed but it is a problem with the compile options I have used. I just found this page which I think explains it : http://lxr.linux.no/#linux+v2.6.28.3/Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt And I quote : === 1. Introduction kbuild includes functionality for building modules both within the kernel source tree and outside the kernel source tree. The latter is usually referred to as external or "out-of-tree" modules and is used both during development and for modules that are not planned to be included in the kernel tree. And : --- 2.1 Building external modules Use the following command to build an external module: ~~~~~ make -C M=`pwd` ~~~~~ For the running kernel use: ~~~~~ make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd` ~~~~~ For the above command to succeed, the kernel must have been built with modules enabled. To install the modules that were just built: ~~~~~ make -C M=`pwd` modules_install ~~~~~ More complex examples will be shown later, the above should be enough to get you started. Also from here : https://wiki.kubuntu.org/KernelCustomBuild MartinPitt: the easiest and best recipe that I found is to treat them as external modules, even when they are in-tree. This avoids having to configure the kernel tree, and also takes care to install them into /extras/, so that they don't overwrite the packages' kernel modules and you have an easy way to revert. For example, to test a patch to the i915 driver: ~~~~~ cd linux-2.6.30/drivers/gpu/drm/i915/ patch i915_drv.c /tmp/patch # make any modification you need here make -C /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r` M=`pwd` modules sudo make -C /usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r` M=`pwd` modules_install sudo depmod -a ~~~~~ This will put the driver into /lib/modules/*/extra/i915.ko; if it breaks, just remove that and do depmod -a again. ------------------------------------------------- I think that is where I was going wrong by just using "sudo make" without the "/build M=`pwd`" bit (whatever THAT means !) Will have a blast & report back............

Re:3.0 b3 Kernel header woes

  • Pablo
  • 07/11/07
  • Mon, 10/12/2009 - 18:25
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Hi reetp! Sorry I can't help with your specific problem with the 2.6.29-1-multimedia-686 kernel. My suggestion is that you try the 2.6.26-1-multimedia-686 whose headers won't give you such problems, I hope. If I remember correctly, this was the first kernel version of 64studio 3.0 (the alpha release) and I didn't have problems when I installed a binary driver (nvidia in my case). Then I upgraded to 2.6.29 and I did have problems with installing the driver so I went back to 2.6.26. (BUT see EDIT) I think Quentin solved the missing headers (or kbuild or whatever) issue with 2.6.29-1-multimedia-amd64 but I am not sure about the i686 flavour. Maybe you can ask in the user's list. If you install the 2.6.26 you will probably have to edit manually the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to add a new entry for the installed kernel. I hope this helps, Pablo EDIT: My memory fails. In the end I was able to install the driver with the 2.26.29... But it seems, there shouldn't be problems now... I don't really know... Now I have only one box with 64tudio 3.0 and I have 2.6.26, so I am not sure. See: http://www.64studio.com/node/1047

Thanks for the reply. As

  • reetp
  • 10/08/09
  • Sun, 10/11/2009 - 14:28
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Thanks for the reply. As per my comments above, I know exactly what the card is (Linksys WMP54G using Ralink rt61pci/rt2571 driver) but cannot for the life of me get it compiled under the included 3.0b3 kernel 2.6.29 I understand that the drivers were left out as the ones supplied with the kernel didn't play too well. Thought I would have a try at rolling my own. Having downloaded the source, and installed the headers I get the following errors : $ sudo make make -C /lib/modules/2.6.29-1-multimedia-686/build SUBDIRS=/home/Desktop/Drivers/RT61-source/Module modules make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.29-1-multimedia-686' /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.29-1-common-multimedia/arch/x86/Makefile:41: /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.29-1-common-multimedia/arch/x86/Makefile_32.cpu: No such file or directory make[3]: *** No rule to make target `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.29-1-common-multimedia/arch/x86/Makefile_32.cpu'. Stop. make[2]: *** [sub-make] Error 2 make[1]: *** [all] Error 2 make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.29-1-multimedia-686' make: *** [all] Error 2 See : http://www.mail-archive.com/64studio-devel@lists.64studio.com/msg00303.html and http://www.mail-archive.com/64studio-users@lists.64studio.com/msg01055.html Think it may be something to do with Kbuild, but have no idea what. Anyone got any idea how to resolve this ?

Hey there, open up a

  • kaimerra
  • 11/14/08
  • Fri, 10/09/2009 - 17:39
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Hey there, open up a terminal console, and lets figure some stuff out. If its PCI type 'lspci' and see what it is recognized as, if USB type 'lsusb' If it is being recognized enter 'dmesg |less' and see if there are any errors being outputted about the wireless. Let us know your results and we can better assist you. :) When I initially install 3.0 beta 3 my wireless doesn't work until I install the firmware for my Intel 3945ABG. maybe you just need the firmware as well. http://www.ralinktech.com/download.php?t=U0wyRnpjMlYwY3k4eU1EQTVMekF6THpNeEwyUnZkMjVzYjJGa056YzVNVFE0TURZd015NTZhWEE5UFQxU1ZEWXhYMFpwY20xM1lYSmxYMVl4TGpJPUM%3D Put the firmware files in /lib/firmware