Hello everybody,

after being properly addressed by Macondo, an experienced user of this forum (you can read the whole story in the last page of the "Debian Configuration Post-Install" thread, under the title "start all over again") I decided to post a new thread, trying to be as concise and to the point as possible.

I started with Knoppix; downloaded Sid (Debian 3.1 unstable, did I get that part right?) but got an incomplete overall installation due to inexperience and soft modem problems. Now, before giving up and starting all over again, I would like to get my driver for the soft winmodem installed once again on Sid (it got lost somewhere in the process), so as to resume my downloads and possibly end up with the complete distro I was dreaming about.

So I downloaded (via Windoze) the slmodem-2.9.10.tar.gz package which had already proved useful on my machine [Acer Aspire 1524WLMi laptop (AMD Athlon 64 CPU, NVIDIA GeForce FX Go 5700 64MB, 512MB DDR RAM)] and after configuring the PATH to the build directory I proceeded to the Make command. Got a whole bunch of errors, the first of which is:

Investigation showed no /linux/ directory exists on my Debian 3.1. Further investigation led me to the following bug, reported by a Debian list:

//lists.debian.org/debian-gcc/2004/11/msg00104.html

Anybody knows anything about it, how to work around it so that I may get my soft modem driver installation going?

Thanks a lot for any possible suggestion.

Regards,

Manuelito

Ever tried compiling your own kernel ?? :-)
Now might be a good time, because it will definatly put the linux (kernel) inlcudes in the correct place.

Modules build while running the self compiled kernel should allways be able to find the correct include location.

This should solve your problem, but its advice from me, someone who likes to build his own kelrnels, and was never satisfied with default kernels from any distribution.

YMMV

Compiling a kernel is good advice and I may be tempted to try and follow it some time or another; but not this time, as I managed to recover the Smart Link modem daemon via a previous tarball I had downloaded and forgotten about, which compiled; with a ppp connection going I finally could bring the apt installation of Sid to an end, and even though much tuning still needs to be done (above all USB mouse and touchpad are not recognized) I can say I'm at the end of this odyssey.

Thank you for your contribution.

Regards,

Manuelito