./configure

[isa]

Hello everyone before i let forth my problems i just want to say that i am a complete newbie to linux and so please bare with me. Any help would be very much appreciated.

Im sure my problem has been encountered by many others before, and trust me when i say i've looked through plenty of howto's as well as forum postings and as a last resort i've come here.

1st of all, I am running a fresh installation of Kubuntu 6.06 LTS (i say 'fresh' because i decided to start all over as opposed to the previous install in which i may have made some changes which I'm not quite sure how to undo)

With a fresh install, every single device on my computer works fine except my wireless network card, a linksys Wireless-G PCI card (wmp54g .v2). From what i understand, what i need to do is install and run ndiswrapper, and for this card (especially .v2 - which is slightly bigger than .v4) i know that ndiswrapper-0.7 works well with it.
So i downloaded ndiswrapper-0.7.tar.gz
did,
tar zxvf ndiswrapper-0.7.tar.gz
then cd ndiswrapper-0.7
this is where the problem starts, when i try './configure' i keep on getting this:
bash: ./configure: No such file or directory

i try to ignore that and do: 'make distclean' and get:
make: *** No rule to make target `distclean'.  Stop.

before i carried out all this: i have installed the build-essential package, gcc,g++, the linux-headers for my kernal version and even the linux-source using Adept. I read somewhere that i have to make a link between the linux source and the modules library using an alteration of:
ln -s /usr/src/linux-<kernel-version> /lib/modules/VERSION/build

however, even after installing the linux-source using adept, what i get in my /usr/src folder is the gzip'd file 'linux-source-2.6.15.tar.bz2' and this makes me wonder how do i install the linux-source from source when I cant even run the ./configure command let alone make or make install?

So to sum it all up:
1. why can't i get ./configure to work
2. do i really need to install the linux-source to be able to compile a package from source and if so how do i compile the linux-source source in the first place?
3. please help me.... any1...

[Rog131]

Re: ./configure

Hmm - where did you get ndiswrapper-0.7.tar.gz ?

If here:
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/n...ar.gz?download

Did you read INSTALL ?

It says:

Installation
============

1. Compile and install
----------------------
As root run

> make install

This should compile both the kernel module and the userspace utilities.

Usually it is:

./configure
make
sudo make install
(opinion: use checkinstall !!)

BUT allways read INSTALL and README.

More:
Installing Software in Ubuntu
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installingsoftware.php

[isa]

Re: ./configure

I downloaded ndiswrapper-0.7.tar.gz from http://www.linux-sec.net/Wireless/In...s/NDISwrapper/

I've downloaded from the source you suggested and it is the exact same one. And yes I did read the INSTALL as well as the README txts.
But no matter what i do, after extracting and getting into the source directory, i can't run ./configure. Is there some prerequisite before being able to carry out:
./configure
make
sudo make install

apart from installing build-essential, is there anything else i need?

[bearyblue]

Re: ./configure

i think Rog131 wants to point out that you don't need to run configure.

[Rog131]

Re: ./configure

Yup - it's just: sudo make install.

Note:

From INSTALL:

Prerequisites
-------------
* You need a recent kernel (at least 2.6.0 or 2.4.20) with source.

[isa]

Re: ./configure

Thank you for your replies. I've been doing a bit more reading from other sites and yeah, i can't run the configure script because it isn't there. But I was under the impression that after extracting any tar.gz file, we had to go through the 3 steps of:
./configure
make
sudo make install

Anyway, I also came across the bit about having the linux-source a while ago, and as i said in my first post, installing the source is quite confusing for me. Once again I've decided to install the linux-source (52k) package. I did this through adept and upon selecting this package (linux-source), it also decides to install another one called "linux-source-2.6.15" (43M) which i assume is the actual source. After completing the download and install, i go to my /usr/src folder, which is no longer empty but contains "linux-source-2.6.15.tar.bz2". Am I right in assuming that this is a compressed file of the source? Hence, not the actual source? And if so, how do i install the actual source?

From the INSTALL text of ndiswrapper-0.7, it says:
Make sure there is a link to the source from the modules directory:
  '/lib/modules/<VERSION>/build' should be a link to the kernel
  source, where <VERSION> is the version of the kernel you are running.

Also read somewhere else that i should use the command below to link the modules directory to the source:
ln -s /usr/src/linux-<kernel-version> /lib/modules/VERSION/build

using uname -r, i get "2.6.15-23-386", so what would the link command above look like?

Hope you all can bare with me a bit longer... this may be a simple task for some but to me it can be quite frustrating... yet a fun learning experience