[sclug] Help! (with a big 'H')

[Alex Butcher]

On Sat, 26 Apr 2008, Neil Haughton wrote:

> In answer to your suggestion about putting things where they oughtabe,
> where should my wireless driver go? I'm using an XP driver with
> ndiswrapper, and yes, somewhat foolishly I left the driver stored in the
> 'lost' data partition - I put it there because I was experimenting with
> ndiswrapper, and it took me so long to get it all working that I never
> got around afterwards to putting it in the 'right' place - but there
> seems little guidance on the Ubuntu way of doing things and I don't want
> to guess in case I store troubles for myself by putting it somewhere
> silly, in terms of the Linux way.?

There is no such thing as 'the Linux way', since every distro tends to do
this sort of thing differently in their scripts.

Googling for 'ndiswrapper ubuntu' found
<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper>, of which
3.4.2 suggests that somewhere under /etc/ndiswrapper is the final resting
place for the installed Windows NDIS drivers. That's as good a place as any,
I suppose, in the absence of /lib/ndiswrapper or /lib/modules/ndiswrapper or
similar. I'd prefer the latter, based on where proprietary firmware ends up
(i.e. /lib/firmware), but OTOH, firmware-tools (which updates CPU microcode)
stores its data in /etc/firmware, so there's precedent for it living under
/etc.

> >From the FHS page on Wikipedia, it seems that /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin
> might be good places, but there seems no obvious 'drivers' location as
> far as I can see. Is /bin a problem? I see that this is available even in
> single user mode (not usually relevant to me, but you never know, one
> day...).

Technically, /bin would be OK. /usr/local/bin may not get mounted until too
late in the boot process. But really, /bin is for unprivileged scripts and
binaries necessary to boot, and I'd argue that a Windows NDIS driver isn't a
script or binary.

> TIA
> Neil

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher, Bristol UK.                           PGP/GnuPG ID:0x5010dbff

"[T]he whole point about the reason why I think it is important we go for
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it is a view, I don't personally think it matters very much."
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