modprobe in Debian 3.1r0a
 

I have installed Debian 3.1r0a from the 14-disc set. I have no net access yet. I want to get my prism2 wireless card working. I have installed and compiled linux-wlan-ng and I now have two files /lib/modules/2.6.8/p80211.ko and /lib/modules/2.6.8/prism2_usb.ko. The man page on modprobe says that out of kernel modules should go under /lib/modules which is where they are but modprobe p80211 returns the error 'module p80211 not found'. Where should these modules be put?
I am aware that some people use ndiswrapper but I have used linux-wlan-ng before
with Red Hat and it was fine there so I'd rather do it this way.

Tony Sumner

You may need to run depmod -a if you haven't rebooted in the meantime (man depmod also). The paths used should be listed in /etc/modules.conf. Alternatively, have you tried using insmod ?

Cheers,

Michael.

Thanks for reply. This has helped to advance my understanding but
I am not there yet.

devmod -a didn't help (but I had rebooted by then). insmod returned
the same error message. /etc/modules.conf used to be the place to go
but with 3.1r0a the use of this has changed. /etc/modules.conf says do
not edit this file, read the man page for update-modules. The man page
says update-modules is obsolete but not much else. man depmod mentions
/etc/modprobe.d and this has files
arch arch-aliases aliases isapnp
(arch-aliases is a symlink to arch/i386). The directory arch contains the
file i386 which lists aliases including (probably put there when I
compiled linux-wlan-ng)
alias wlan0 prism2_usb
but this is hardly useful since man modprobe says that files under
/etc/modprobe.d/arch are ignored. Can you see why I am confused?

I read a bit further in /etc/modules.conf and it says that
/etc/modutils/aliases tells modprobe what modules to load. So I added
alias lines for p80211 and prism2_usb. modprobe p80211 still says
module not found but modprobe wlan0 returns 'prism2_usb not found' so
at least the alias works but I am back with the original question,
where should p80211 and prism2_usb be put?

Yes, I can see why you're confused !

Just to check, are you certain that you're kernel versions match ? How many directories do you have under /lib/modules ? If more than one, then run uname -r to check the currently running kernel version. This must match exactly to the /lib/modules/2.6.8-xxx version. Oftentimes if you have compiled a new kernel, but left the existing debian vanilla kernel remaining then you will have two or more module trees.

I must confess that I still use 2.4.27 almost all most of the time, thus am not entirely sure of the protocols for 2.6.x. Under the former, seperately compiled modules are readily insmod'ed after placing in /lib/modules/`uname -r`/, and can be autoloaded at boot time by listing in /etc/modules -- perhaps this has changed since, however.

I hope that this helps a little -- let me know either way.

Cheers,

Michael.

linux-wlan-ng needs the source tree so I d/l the kernel source, ran make config. I now have two directories under /lib/modules,
2.6.8-2-386 and 2.6.8, the last having been put there by linux-wlan-ng. The 2.6 kernel does things differently, and the
documentation is a mess, so the question can only be answered I think by someone who uses a 2.6 kernel. So why am I trying to
install it? It may be time to cut my losses and go for ndiswrapper.

Thanks for your help

Tony

I suspect that this is the problem -- you are presumably running 2.6.8-2-386, while your new modules are sitting patiently in 2.6.8. You could try copying them across to the former directory, but in my experience this seldom works.

Failing this, you could recompile the kernel using your new sources, giving you a slimmer system as well as matching kernel and module versions.

Cheers,

Michael.

You may be right. I thought the wireless modules should be put in a directory under /lib/modules but I think they are meant to
be under /lib/modules/`uname -r`. Any way I did what you suggest, moved them to /lib/modules/2.6.8-2-386/linux-wlan and now
modprobe does load them. Hurrah, etc!

Thanks,
Tony

Great to hear !

Cheers,

Michael.