Wireless driver needs to be recompiled after each kernel upgrade

Question

I have a D-Link DWA-125 Wifi USB key, which I managed to get running via this tutorial: http://kaustav.codebinders.com/2011/10/install-dwa-125-wireless-driver-on-ubuntu-11-10.html

The only problem I have is that every time I upgrade the kernel I need to rebuild and re-enable the module.

Is there any way around this?

I am currently running 12.04 (I did have the same issue with the 11.10 release).

Answer 1

I have a possible solution to having to manually recompile the kernel module. I wrote a simple script a while back to recompile kernel modules if DKMS support isn't available - it runs on boot, and asks the user if they want to recompile the modules if the kernel has changed. You can download it here.

I can't promise it'll work, but hopefully it should. If you use the normal (manual source) driver along with the script it should be OK.

Answer 2

For some reason I can't leave the comments but can only answer here:) I had the same problem with installing my card(rt2870). All I had to do is to rename the binary file(the one that ends with .ko) in the ../os/linux to the one that is missing and after that I run build again without any issues.

Answer 3

Did you compile it with DKMS ? It's normal to have to recompile a module after a kernel update, module compiled with DKMS are automatically recompiled at each update.