Short documentation: Dell OMSA 4.4 on Debian Sarge

[Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists]

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Buchan Milne wrote:

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> Pauli Borodulin wrote:
>> Tomas Pospisek's Mailing Lists wrote:
>>
>>> I've installed your debs and they work just fine. Thanks a lot!
>>
>> You're welcome. :-)
>>
>>> Would you be interested in formalizing the OMSA Drivers building process
>>> so that one can automatically build a *.deb out of it? I've done a bit
>>> of that just in case...
>>
>> Do you mean something similar to Dell's approach of compiling the kernel
>> modules on boot up for the currently running kernel?
>>
>> This should be quite easy. I just have to write an init.d script which
>> does some minor checking (sources are available, kernel config exists,
>> etc.) and then compiles the driver using the builddriver.sh I have
>> already written.
>
> And, this is almost exactly what dkms does ... maybe a dkms .deb package
> would be a better idea (instead of re-inventing it).

Note that it's exactly what Debian's make-kpgk/module-assistant does also. 
I remember when Dell was inquiring about implementing dkms on linux-kernel 
I wrote the person from Dell in question and asked about collaborating 
with Debian, since they allready had the necessary infrastructure. The 
interest in making an effort to have a common infrastructure instead 
of reinventing the whell from Dell's (or better that Dell employe's) side 
was pretty very low at the time [1].

In order to bring dkms up to speed on Debian someone would need to patch 
it. Is Dell ready to do that work or to accept those patches?
*t

(I'm Cc:ing Matt Domsch here, since AFAI can see he has done quite a
  few efforts in the past to provide material for other systems too)

[1] If anybody is interested and with permission of the person from Dell I
     should be able to dig those semi-personal mails out from my archive.

--
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   Tomas Pospisek
   http://sourcepole.com -  Linux & Open Source Solutions
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