rebuilding the driver

Even if you are using a Linux distribution that already ships with the Gigaset drivers, you may still want to rebuild them yourself in order to take full advantage of their capabilities. The most frequent reason for this is that your distribution did not enable the recommended configuration options, GIGASET_CAPI to enable CAPI 2.0 support and GIGASET_DEBUG to enable debug messages.

Rebuilding the drivers requires three steps:

This page describes these steps. It is based on the openSUSE distribution (tested with releases 11.4 and 12.1) but should easily be adaptable to other distributions.

installing required packages

Building a kernel module requires certain software packages, notably

For openSUSE, selecting the kernel development installation pattern should provide all necessary packages. For other distributions, consult that distribution's documentation on how to (re-)build kernel modules.

preparing the source tree

In order to build modules that will be usable with the installed kernel, the kernel source tree has to be prepared with that kernel's configuration. The following commands have been tested with openSUSE 11.4 but should work for other distributions as well, possibly with small adaptations. They must be run as "root" because the /usr/src/linux directory is typically not writable by regular users: 

cd /usr/src/linux
make clean
cp /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build/.config .
cp /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/build/Module.symvers .
make menuconfig
make scripts
make prepare
The make menuconfig step will run the kernel configuration utility. (You may use make nconfig or make xconfig if you prefer; the latter requires the Qt development libraries to be installed.) Go to the section 
Device Drivers
- ISDN Support
  - Siemens Gigaset support
and set the configuration options: Be careful not to change any other settings inadvertently. In particular, if you use make xconfig, clicking on the checkbox in front of "Siemens Gigaset support" might change that option from "build as module" (dot) to "build into kernel" (check mark), causing the Gigaset CAPI support option to disappear and defeating the subsequent building of the module.

compiling and installing

After preparing the source tree, the Gigaset driver modules can be compiled and installed with the commands (to be run as "root"): 

cd /usr/src/linux
make M=drivers/isdn/gigaset
make M=drivers/isdn/gigaset modules_install
depmod -a
The newly compiled modules will be installed in the 'extra' modules directory of the current kernel. The separate depmod -a command is necessary, otherwise the system will continue using the original ones in the 'drivers' directory.

what next

Now that you have installed the Gigaset drivers with the options you need, go ahead with setting them up as described on the driver page.