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<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 6/8/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Matt Zimmerman</b> <<a href="mailto:mdz@ubuntu.com">mdz@ubuntu.com</a>> wrote:</span></div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">* The most common way to obtain a new driver for a Linux system is<br> to compile it from C source code<br>
<br>* A common reason to install a new driver on a Linux system is to gain<br> access to the Internet, so support can be difficult to obtain in such a<br> scenario<br><br>* A great deal of distribution-agnostic documentation assumes the
<br> availability of gcc<br><br>* Users who are new to Ubuntu have no idea how to install the necessary<br> packages for building a kernel module</blockquote>
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<div>User who are new to linux and are using ubuntu will use the ubuntu documentation. In it, installing build-essential is properly described. It is another step in the process of:</div>
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<div>1- finding out that they need to compile a kernel module to fix a specific problem.</div>
<div>2- finding out what kernel module to build</div>
<div>3- obtaining it (if it is the only way to conect to the net, this is a catch-22)</div>
<div>4- installing the toolchain and linux-headers package</div>
<div>5- building and installing the module.</div>
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<div>Providing build-essential preinstalled will only help users who are familiar with linux but not with ubuntu. Users who expect gcc to be installed may be surprised to find it absent, but I am sure they expect it to be easily installed, which it is as well as the process being properly documented - it's not that big an endeavour for them.
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<div>Is this such an important amount of users? Ubuntu makes a better effort to target non-linux-geek users, in comparison to other distros. </div>
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<div>Users who are not familiar with linux will not really expect gcc to be present. The command-line is cryptic enough and they typically will not try to grok upstream documentation, but simply cut-and-paste instructions from a source of documentation.
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<div>Can the above five steps be made trivial in some way, either by documentation or some sort of frontend to module-assistant? Would that be a better solution to the actual problem?</div>
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<div>azz</div>
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