Comedi installation procedure in Ubuntu/Debian

[captainron]

It seems as though every time I try to compile comedi I fail
miserably. I've tried to use the module-assistant approach which fails
because of missing config.sub files, I have in the past compiled
comedi-source directly but ever since kernel 2.6.18 (I think, maybe a
version later) the compile gives errors on several driver files. I
have hacked and slashed the build environment before to prevent it
from trying to compile those drivers but that's less than ideal. Now
it seems that I can't even get the source using cvs because the links
are broken.

What is the best way to install comedi and what is the best
distribution for it? I would like to keep with something current
because a lot of the code that I write is in Vala and I can't use an
old release of Debian like Etch because the glib version is so out of
date. Will Gentoo work any better? Slackware? Arch? Alternatively, is
there a way of adding the comedi modules directly by selecting them
while configuring a new kernel with menuconfig?

[Gudjon I. Gudjonsson]

Hi
What Debian version and kernel version are you using? There was a bug in an
old package that I guess you are using and you can compile the package by
installing libtool. The newer version doesn't use config.* from libtool.
The newest kernels do include the comedi modules so there is no need to
compile them.

Hope it helps
Gudjon

[Apodaca, Bob]

Gudjon I. Gudjonsson wrote:
> Hi
> What Debian version and kernel version are you using? There was a bug in an
> old package that I guess you are using and you can compile the package by
> installing libtool. The newer version doesn't use config.* from libtool.
> The newest kernels do include the comedi modules so there is no need to
> compile them.
>
> Hope it helps
> Gudjon

I just used module-assistant to compile a package for 2.6.32-5-686.
While it did compile and produced a deb, here is what the deb contains:

root@dev:/usr/src# dpkg -c comedi
comedi-modules-2.6.32-5-686_0.7.76+20090411cvs-3+2.6.32-30_i386.deb
comedi.tar.bz2
root@az43tsrdist6:/usr/src# dpkg -c
comedi-modules-2.6.32-5-686_0.7.76+20090411cvs-3+2.6.32-30_i386.deb
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2011-02-08 13:19 ./
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2011-02-08 13:19 ./usr/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2011-02-08 13:19 ./usr/share/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2011-02-08 13:19 ./usr/share/doc/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2011-02-08 13:19
./usr/share/doc/comedi-modules-2.6.32-5-686/
-rw-r--r-- root/root 118237 2008-01-28 14:09
./usr/share/doc/comedi-modules-2.6.32-5-686/changelog.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root 1909 2009-06-01 19:58
./usr/share/doc/comedi-modules-2.6.32-5-686/changelog.Debian.gz
-rw-r--r-- root/root 1334 2009-06-01 19:58
./usr/share/doc/comedi-modules-2.6.32-5-686/copyright
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2011-02-08 13:19 ./lib/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2011-02-08 13:19 ./lib/modules/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2011-02-08 13:19 ./lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/
drwxr-xr-x root/root 0 2011-02-08 13:19
./lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/comedi/

Any suggestions?

[Gudjon I. Gudjonsson]

On Tuesday 08 February 2011 21:27:09 Apodaca, Bob wrote:
> I just used module-assistant to compile a package for 2.6.32-5-686.
> While it did compile and produced a deb, here is what the deb contains:

...
>
> Any suggestions?
Since kernel version around 2.6.30 comedi has been a part of the kernel tree
and therefore there is no need to use the comedi module package
The comedi modules should by default be installed under:
/lib/modules/2.6.32-5-686/kernel/drivers/staging/comedi/drivers/

/Gudjon

[captainron]

In the past Debian Lenny, and Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid. Most recently
just with Debian Squeeze with kernel 2.6.32. If there in the kernel
now does that mean I can just insmod comedi?

[captainron]

Sorry, are you saying that it did work for you or it didn't? If you
ended up with .deb files you made it further than I was able to, what
steps did you take to do that?

I did the following:

sudo apt-get install comedi-source module-assistant
sudo m-a clean
sudo m-a prepare
sudo m-a a-i comedi

after that I got some errors that were fixed by installing addition
dependencies but after that is when I received the errors regarding to
the config.sub files.

[captainron]

I can see them there now, that makes using comedi so much better. I
have always been so annoyed with setting everything up but this should
make it completely painless. Thank you so much for the enlightenment.