[MPlayer-users] Problems at driver-install - answer not in the FAQ

[Xabier Yeregi]

I have also experienced the modversions.h problem when I tried to
compile the mga_vid driver (on rh9). Installing the kernel-headers or
even the complete kernel-source won't solve the problem.

* If you install the kernel-headers from glibc-kernheaders, you will get
a modversions.h file:

rpm -ql glibc-kernheaders-2.4-8.10 | grep modversions
/usr/include/linux/modversions.h

But this is not the file you need, as the compiler complains, you need
the headers from the kernel-source package.

* My next attempt was to download and unpack the kernel-source. To my
surprise there isn't any modversions.h file in the kernel-source
"include" directory.

You will ONLY get modversions.h if you compile the kernel-source, since
modversions.h is an automatically generated file! Have a look at:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2002-18/0072.html

This seems to be a quite common problem when trying to compile device
drivers. There are two solutions suggested at:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2002-18/0318.html

By the way, according to Alan Cox, "A device driver should not be
directly including modversions.h." Read on at:
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2002-18/0253.html

Xabier Yeregi
<xabier at yeregi dot com>
Telecommunication Engineer