[ubuntu-uk] Advent Touch Print printer ....

[Jim Price]

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