[ Background: Installing drivers for Broadcom's wireless card on
a Dell M6400 laptop running a Live USB of
Fedora-14-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso failed to result in a wireless
connection; since Broadcom's sources from
http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php
need to be built using a kernel of the target OS, and since I
don't have access to any other F14, I now need to build these
sources on the live USB, using the laptop's internal drive as a
place to hold the required libraries etc. And I am new to such
activities.]
Briefly, I was able to build the sources from Broadcom, but
not without having to overcome some hurdles! Here are the
details:
The command:
yum --installroot=/media/OS/home/f14 install kernel-headers kernel-devel
failed with the message:
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Adding en_US to language list
Error: Cannot retrieve repository metadata (repomd.xml)
for repository: fedora. Please verify its path and try
again
Could not parse metalink
https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-$releasever&arch=x86_64
error was
No repomd file
Not being used to reading error messages in detail, I just
googled for the first line of the error message, and found:
http://digitizor.com/2009/06/17/how-to-fix-the-cannot-retrieve-repository-metadata-repomd-xml-error-in-fedora-11/
As per that web-page, I modified /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo
and /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo -- but not /etc/hosts.
yum failed again, but this time I read the error message in
detail -- and noticed $releasever in the url. I went back to
the two .repo files and replaced $releasever by 14 ($basearch
would automatically become x86_64).
Question 1: What's the bug that prevents $releaserver from
taking its value?
This time, although the yum command went forward, it aborted
with some message (alas!, I didn't record the error message).
The above web-page mentioned modifying the /etc/hosts file,
which I hadn't done; I pinged both mirrors.fedoraproject.org
and mirrors.rpmfusion.org and found that the numerical
addresses did _match_ the values in that web-page. Still
puzzled, I went ahead and edited /etc/hosts files as advised,
and tried yum again -- it succeeded!
Question 2: Why did I need to modify the /etc/hosts file even
though ping showed that the human-readable
addresses were being resolved to correct values?
Perhaps, it was just some congestion at the
destination url, and the command would have worked
the second time even without the modification to
/etc/hosts?
Then I did:
yum --installroot=/media/OS/home/f14 install gcc
Not having wget, I used Firefox to get Broadcom's sources
hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_38.tar.gz.
The attempts to build the sources had hurdles too, all but one
of the hurdles was because of the non-standard installation
location.
I had to update PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH, which is
understandable.
export PATH=$PATH:/media/OS/home/f14/usr/local/bin:/media/OS/home/f14/usr/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/media/OS/home/f14/usr/lib64
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/media/OS/home/f14/usr/lib64/perl5/CORE
I had to create some soft-links:
cd /lib/modules/2.6.35.6-45.fc14.x86_64/
mv build build.org
ln -s /media/OS/home/f14/usr/src/kernels/2.6.35.6-45.fc14.x86_64 build
cd /usr/lib64
ln -s /media/OS/home/f14/usr/lib64/perl5 perl5
cd ../share
ln -s /media/OS/home/f14/usr/share/perl5 perl5
I think the need for the preceding is understandable too;
"understandable" meaning this need does _not_ occur because of
some bug in the process of installing in the non-default location.
Then there was the issue about not finding ld; I poked around
and found something strange:
cd /media/OS/home/f14/usr/bin
ls -laF ld
ld -> /etc/alternatives/ld
cd /media/OS/home/f14/etc/alternatives
ls -laF ld*
ld -> /usr/bin/ld.bfd
The above is strange since the use of absolute paths in the
links means that there will be issues when the modules are
installed in a non-default location! I modified the above
as follows:
cd /media/OS/home/f14/etc/alternatives
ln -s ../../usr/bin/ld.bfd ld
ln -s ../../usr/bin/ld.bfd ld.bfd
cd /media/OS/home/f14/usr/bin
# Should have used a relative path in the next command
# Even better, could have just done: ln -s ld.bfd ld
ln -s /media/OS/home/f14/etc/alternatives/ld ld
Question 3: Why doesn't the module that provides ld use
relative paths in the soft links -- thereby
allowing that module to be easily installed in
a non-standard location?
Question 4: An annoying thing about the terminal is that
selection does nothing and right click brings up
a menu -- how to change this so that selection
results in an automatic copy to the clipboard,
and right-click results in paste?
I have not yet gotten to installing the wl.ko; hope to do so
something this week.
--Suresh
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