Mandriva 2007 free and 3rd party drivers
 

Hi,
I have a brand new Toshiba Satellite Pro A110 laptop that I thought I'd try Mandriva 2007 on. I downloaded and burned the Mandriva 2007 Free DVD without any problems. The install went perfectly except for a few driver issues, nothing unexpected.
Unfortunately, the missing drivers are for both the built in LAN and the Centrino wireless LAN.
I booted with a Ubunto CD, and confirmed that the driver I need for the LAN is the r1000 driver from Realtek. I downloaded that driver from Realtek, and went to install it, and that's when I encountered problems.
The file Modules.symvers file is missing. Apparently it's 'not needed' since Mandriva kernels don't do version checking. Unfortunately, this driver DOES require that file since it uses it at compile time to identify the kernel version. The end result is that the driver will not compile, it breaks with syntax errors in the code as a result of some missing symbol definitions. I get a similar result when trying to build the WiFi driver.
OK, I can create that file by installing the kernel source, and building my own kernel. Installing the kernel source went fine, then 'make config' and selected the defaults for everything. when I used 'make' to build the kernel, the compile died with syntax errors in drivers/sound/3rdparty/sheep.c (I may have the path there wrong, I'm going from memory)

So, it appears that I cannot compile the stock kernel as installed from my DVD, and I cannot compile the drivers I need without it.
Any suggestions as to what to try next to resolve this issue?

Oh jeez...it's a scary thing when a kernel doesn't compile. :|

I haven't messed around with trying to rebuild the kernel from the source supplied on the mdv DVD. If mdv kernels don't use version checking, and you need version checking, download a kernel source, copy it to a usb thumbdrive or re-writable CD, and...yadda yadda yadda.

Keep in mind that mdv kernels have alot of custom made modules for certain filesystem types (I'm not sure if mdv2007 still uses the "supermount" fs at all, but I know mdv2006 does), and other things. :)