Kde Upgrade, Lost Wifi
 

I am currently running Kubuntu 5.10, everything was working great. I connect to the net via my Intel Pro Wireless 2200 card. Last night I upgraded to kde 3.5 with apt-get dist-upgrade. After the packages were downloaded and installed, rebooted. Everything seemed fine so I shutdown and went to sleep. Today when I logged in, I lost my wifi capabilities! I noticed that this upgrade installed a newer kernel, I had 2.6.12.9, I now have 2.6.12.10. I tried to re-install my ipw2200 drivers from source and got an error about /lib/modules/2.6.12.10-686/build not being found. There is a /lib/modules/2.6.12.10-686/ folder, but no build. I tried making a build folder within that directory but that did not change anything. I guess I am trying to find out why this upgrade installed this new kernel (I thought I was just upgrading kde)? Why are my ipw2200 drivers not working? Also why did it not upgrade to the current kernel 2.6.15.1? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

If the /build directory doesn't exist, probably the kernel source is not installed. The drivers likely needs the kernel source in order to compile.

This is a common problem when upgrading kernels using the automatic updaters (apt-get, swaret, etc). I personally find it best to exclude kernel files from these updaters. If you decide to upgrade a kernel, download the source and compile it manually.

That's what I figured. The problem is that the kernel source was not downloaded with the upgrade, and I no longer have an active net connection. I will download the source from work and give it another go. In the future, how would I exclude kernel files when using apt-get dist-upgrade?

I installed the linux-headers for my kernel. I then re-installed my ipw2200 drivers and ieee80211 network stack. Everything is back to normal now.