Comment 30 for bug 162671

Revision history for this message
hal2k1 (quiet1) wrote :

@Jim Lieb

>I got it to compile in staging in our ubuntu-karmic git.

...

>As for carrying this in Karmic, we prefer that the driver at least be "on its way" out of staging before we consider it for inclusion. This keeps the not-inconsiderable maintenance cost of an non-mainstream patch and its churn to a minimum. Drivers/modules that come into the kernel this way also don't get lost as we rebase the kernel at each release cycle. I think the best way forward is for the developer to take this input, generate patches to staging to get it moving forward into a mainline merge. We can help with that effort by providing input/review. I do not have this device so I can't really test it myself.

I have a netbook that uses this device, and I previously downloaded the source from:
http://www.viaarena.com/Driver/VT6656_Linux_src_v1.19_12_x86.zip
and compiled it using checkinstall under Kubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty). That worked well enough, but of course there was a need to re-compile it every time the kernel changed.

I have recently loaded as a trial Kubuntu Karmic alpha 3 netbook image.
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu-netbook/daily-live/current/
I used Unetbootin with the .iso image file, and I was able to boot the netbook machine from a USB stick. Just about the only thing that didn't work straight away was of course the wireless, because of this VT6656 chip.

The source code version above that worked on Jaunty doesn't compile under Karmic.

Anyway, since I have the hardware, and I have Karmic alpha 3 installed, I am willing to test it on Karmic and provide logs of whatever happens, but I would need git CLI instructions posted here first on how I would go about compiling and installing this driver from the kernel staging area.