My friend, let me be that guy that says “that’s nothing!”. In 2002 (around kernel 2.14 I think it was) notebooks had no integrated wifi (at least not the second hand notebook I could afford, and it wasn’t cheap anyway). I had to buy a cisco pmcia wifi card from across the world and recompile the kernel to include wifi support (and the driver of course). I don’t remember why, but I remember that recompiling the kernel happened quite frequently. Maybe because I was distro hopping a lot or because there were quite (relatively speaking) kernel updates.
Not good old days, but at least I learnt!
There was no DKMS back then (it appeared in 2003 and took a while longer to be adopted) so anything you wanted to add to the kernel and didn’t have a ready-made binary module for your exact machine and distro had to come as a patch + recompile.
My friend, let me be that guy that says “that’s nothing!”. In 2002 (around kernel 2.14 I think it was) notebooks had no integrated wifi (at least not the second hand notebook I could afford, and it wasn’t cheap anyway). I had to buy a cisco pmcia wifi card from across the world and recompile the kernel to include wifi support (and the driver of course). I don’t remember why, but I remember that recompiling the kernel happened quite frequently. Maybe because I was distro hopping a lot or because there were quite (relatively speaking) kernel updates. Not good old days, but at least I learnt!
There was no DKMS back then (it appeared in 2003 and took a while longer to be adopted) so anything you wanted to add to the kernel and didn’t have a ready-made binary module for your exact machine and distro had to come as a patch + recompile.
But you try to tell the young people today that… and they won’t believe yah!
https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE?si=6qGRgsuMSx7NaA_D