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  • Registered: 2009-01-03
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Topic: Apply driver patch

Hi everyone,

I just bought a new laptop and have pretty much all the hardware working with Statler Alpha 2. However, the touchpad hardware Dell chose seems to not be fully supported yet. Someone from Dell created a patch (https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/118834/), but I'm not sure how to apply it.

I've got module-assistant and build-essential installed because of the NVidia and Broadcom hardware. Can someone please help me understand what I need to do to apply the touchpad patch mentioned in https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/118834/ ?

Thanks so much!

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Re: Apply driver patch

As a follow-up, I'm not confident that I need to recompile the entire kernel for this one "alps" driver. I'd love to just drop a new .so file into the kernel drivers directory, but I just don't know how to build this individual driver file using the patch mentioned above. I've been scouring Google,b ut all I can find that makes any sense is how to recompile the entire kernel.

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Re: Apply driver patch

I think I may be on to something here. I found this article on debian-administration.org. Seems that, if I can determine which package provides alps.so, then I can use this article to rebuild the package with the patch listed above.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/20

Am I on the right track?