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This howto shows howto ship drivers with SUSE Linux Enterprise.

This is required if drivers shipped with SLE are either outdated, or if the hardware SLE is shipped with requires non-opensource drivers, which are never shipped by Novell anyways.

Before you start building the drivers, you should check with the hardware vendor if they already provide installation repositories for SLE. If so, you can use their repositories to update the drivers.

Contents 1 building the drivers 2 shipping the drivers

building the drivers

The first step is to build binary packages of the drivers to be shipped.

To integrate flawlessly with SUSE Linux, these have to be built according to the manuals:

• Kernel Module Packagers Manual for SLE 9

• Kernel Module Packagers Manual for SLE 10

Depending on your PartnerNet for Technology Partners status or support contracts with Novell, you then have several options that help you in case of updates: http://www.novell.com/partners/technology/dprocess.html

shipping the drivers

Note

The steps described below now can also be done using YaST's AddonCD-Module. Please see Creating_Add-on_Media_with_YaST for details.

We recommend to ship drivers as an “Addon-Product” to SLE. Instructions on howto build a kernel module (update) installation source can be found under:

http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Creating_a_Kernel_Module_Update_Installation_Source

A YaST module for building addon products is being worked on and will be included in SLE10 SP1.

In case the driver has to be updated due to changes in the kernel's ABI with an update, you should provide these as an online installation source. If you are using the Novell Partner Linux Driver Build Service, and the drivers are licensed under the GPL, Novell can host these drivers for you.

There are 2 ways to include these (update) installation sources with your installation media:

• Create a file “add_on_products” in the root directory of your first CD or DVD with the following content:

media_url [path_on_media [product_1 [product_2 [....]]]

media_url is URL of the media itself path_on_media is path of the catalog on the media. If not present, / (root) is assumed product_1 and following are the names for products, which should be marked for installation. If no product is mentioned, all products found on the media are selected.

• Include the addon product in your autoYaST profile. The entry looks like that:

<add-on>
  <add_on_products config:type="list"> 
    <listentry>
      <media_url>http://your.ip/directory</media_url>
      <product>OEM Driver Updates</product>
      <product_dir>/</product_dir> 
    </listentry>
   </add_on_products> 
</add-on>

YaST checks the signatures of files on the installation source now. If a content file is not signed, during a manual installation YaST asks the user what to do. During an autoinstallation, the installation source gets rejected silently. We recommend to sign all installation sources. If you really want to use an unsigned installation source, please see the autoYaST documentation on howto do it.

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