Building RPM's in SuSE

[Mark Ryan_3]

Can someone advise me on how best to build RPM's in SuSE Linux 8.2? I have some drivers for a dual com port card that needs a compiler on every PC I install it on. I'd like to remove the need for the compiler and use the RPM's to install the drivers where needed, if possible?
Thanks
Mark.

[Mark Grant]

I might be being a bit dense here, but I'm not sure why building an RPM is going to help. You may as well just "tar" up your files and copy that. If the driver needs to be compiled on each machine, then it is still going to need to be compiled, is still going to require all the same files etc etc.

If it doesn't need to be compiled individually then you probably only need to copy the /lib/modules/2.x.x/wherever/driver.o file around.

I would, however, draw your attention to the beginning of my inital sentence. It often holds true.

[Mark Ryan_3]

Thanks for that Mark. The reason I want to be able to do this is because I don't want to have a compiler on the machine and I may need to put this on several hundred PC's. I was hoping that it would be easier to use RPM's. I'm relatively new at this stuff so all your help is appreciated.
Thanks again

[Mark Grant]

In that case, as long as the systems are pretty much identical builds, you probably only need to copy the actual driver "*.o" file. I would at least try it. Build your driver on one machine and see where in the /lib/modules tree it ends up being put. Then copy that file to another machine, to the same location and do a quick "depmod -a" as root. Then see if the kernel loads the module (modprobe ). If not, you might need to play with the odd kernel setting but if the kernel is the same as your build machine, you should be OK.

[Jerome Henry]

Here is a link that could help :

http://www.suse.de/~mmj/Package-Conventions/SuSE-Package-Conventions.html

J

[Roshan Sequeira]

If all your Linux machines are running the same version of the Linux kernel, it is not necessary to compile the drivers on every machine. You just need to copy the .o files as suggested already.

If your machines are running different kernel versions, packaging your drivers as an RPM won't solve the problem of having to recompile for every different kernel version. In such a case packaging as a SRPM (source RPM) has the advantage of provideing a clean and well understood framework for compilation.

Take a look at http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ and most of your RPM related questions should be answered.

[Cuitlahuac]

I send you a pdf file to let you know a little about a software that let you build RPMs (man build)==========> you may have installed===>ftp://mirror.storagetek.com/pub/systems/suse/i386/8.2/suse/noarch/build-2003.3.8-4.noarch.rpm