Installing a source rpm

[joshtech]

hey all,
just installed Fedora Core 2 Test 1 on my new laptop,
everything installed just great... accept the onboard network card and wireless card, I figured the wireless card wouldn't go so I'm not really worried about that.
the network card I have is a Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5788
the network card does show up in ifconfig as eth0 but in the network config utility in fedora it doesn's show up.

downloaded the newest drivers from broadcom's site
tried to start the compile... but I get this lovely error:

rpm -ivf bcm5700-7.1.22-1.src.rpm
/etc/security/selinux/src/policy/file_contexts/file_contexts: no such file or directory
error: cannot create %sourcedir /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES

now this is a fresh install of Fedora so I'm not sure why I'm even getting this error.

installing the driver itself is pretty well covered by the instructions
but if I Can't get past this then.... :S

funny thing though.. just for kicks I installed lindows 4.5 dev ed.
and it worked just fine, including the ethernet card.

any suggestions?

[foolish]

First of all, you are using a test release. Compare this to beeing a test pilot for a plane that doesn't entirely work. You use test releases to find the errors, so that they can be fixed.

Just as you don't learn how to fly a plane by beeing a test-pilot for some government funded research project, you don't learn how to use Fedora by using a test release, especially the first of the 3 test releases.

If you don't want to be a test-pilot, you should use a stable release of Fedora, Core 1 is the current stable release.

Fedora is an open-source only distro, as such it's free for you to download. This means that any drivers, video codecs, audio formats and so on that isn't open-source won't be included in Fedora. If they were, Fedora wouldn't be free, nor open.

Maybe, and I don't know this for sure, Lindows had the non-open driver in there by default. And the charge you pay to get Lindows solved the whole open source only problem. In Fedora, you will have to install this driver


That beeing said, the src.rpm is probably a driver for the card that has to be compiled against the kernel that you are currently using. I may be wrong about this, read up on it. I'm sure the site you got the src.rpm from offers at least some information.

To build the package against your kernel you have to rebuild the driver from source, the src.rpm contains the source and instructions for the rpm system on how to build the package.

To build rpms you need a lot of things, first of all you need the rpmbuild package, install that by yum or whatever package manager you prefer. You'll also need a compiler and more. To compile against the kernel, you will also need the kernel-source package, install that one as well. The rpmbuild program will tell you what packages you're missing if you're missing any.

You should never do something as root, when it can be done as user. The building of rpms is like that, it can be done as user and as such, it should be. For the user to be able to build rpm he or she will need to have write permission to the /usr/src/redhat directory and its subdirs.

Log in as root: su -

and then just change the ownership of /usr/src/redhat/ to the user that will build the rpms like this:

chown -R username /usr/src/redhat/

Then log in as the user and rebuild the src.rpm, defining your current kernel-versiion and architecture. What? You don't know your kernel-version or/and architecture, no worries. Here's how you get them both:

rpm -q --qf "%{version}-%{release} %{arch}\n" kernel |grep `uname -r`

This will return something like this:
2.4.22-1.2149.nptl i686.

Remember to do this as user, not root. Start the rebuild, use the information in the output of the last command.

rpmbuild --rebuild --target i686 --define 'kernel 2.4.22-1.2149.nptl' packagename.src.rpm

The package will build and when its done the rpm can be located in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/. The binary in my example will be found in: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i686/