Kenneth's Custom Kernel for Velleman K8000 on Fedora Core 4

Update for Fedora 7. It now seems there is no need to compile your own kernel. The device is there per defailt. So now you can jump to Edit the modules.conf file.

How to get Velleman K8000 working in Fedora Core 4.

You can also use this guide for other distributions but then you have to find an alternative source of information for downloading and installing the kernel sources.

Velleman requires a kernel module which is not enabled per default in the Fedora kernels.

Solution is to rebuild Fedora FC4 kernel sources.

Download source RPM

The kernel source RPM for Fedora Core 4 can be found here

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/updates/4/SRPMS/

Look for the kernel-VERSION_FC4.src.rpm file.

I will use the filename kernel-2.6.13-1.1526_FC4.src.rpm in the following.

And save them anywhere (in your home dir for example)

Create source tree

Now we need to get from RPM to kernel source tree and located at the good old /usr/src tree.

rpm -Uvh kernel-2.6.13-1.1526_FC4.src.rpm

This writes the RPM contents into /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES and /usr/src/redhat/SPECS.

Prepare the kernel sources using the commands:

cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
rpmbuild -bp --target $(arch) kernel-2.6.spec

Move source tree to /usr/src

Now we move it to the /usr/src tree and make a link called linux pointing to it

cd /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.13
mv linux-2.6.13/ /usr/src/
cd /usr/src
ln -s linux-2.6.13 linux
cd /usr/src/linux

Get right config file

Next step is to get the right config file.

The .config which is already there is for i686 standard single CPU. If you need something else copy the desired config file from the /usr/src/linux/configs directory. I needed the smp version.

cp configs/kernel-2.6.13-i686-smp.config .config

Configure Kernel

Start up your kernel configurator

make menuconfig (text mode for text terminal access)

For activating the modules needed for Velleman K8000 navigate to

Device Drivers -> I2C Support -> I2C Hardware Bus Support and activate Parallel Port Adapter and Parallel Port Adapter (light)

The one that is known to work with kernel 2.6.10 is Parallel Port Adapter (i2c-parport module). Activate both as Module so that you can choose one or the other.

Finally save and exit

Change the EXTRAVERSION in Makefile

(optional)

Open the Makefile in an editor.

Find the line EXTRAVERSION = -prep

and change it to a name that describes the special kernel version you are building. For example

EXTRAVERSION = -velleman

Build Kernel

Now we build the kernel the standard way.

make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
make install

Save the configure file

It is nice to keep the config we used for some other time.

cp /usr/src/linux/.config /boot/config-2.6.13-velleman

Edit the Grub config file

Edit /boot/grub/grub.conf

To activate the new kernel as default set default=0.

Reboot the machine

You should now get the new kernel activated.

Edit the modules.conf file

We add an option to modules.conf so that the i2c_parport module is loaded with the option type=2

Open /etc/modules.conf in an editor.

Add this line

options i2c-parport type=2

Now we want to load our new kernel module

Run these two commands

modprobe i2c-parport
modprove i2c-dev

Try and run lsmod to check that the module is loaded.

Identify the device name assigned.

Go to the directory /sys/class/i2c-dev

You should normally see two devices: i2c-0 and i2c-1. However you may see more. If you have a TV card or a video capture card you will see a device for each BT878 chip. Each device is a directory. If you change directory you will see 3 files: dev, device, and name. If you look at the name the Velleman device is the one called "Parallel port adapter".

cd i2c-1
cat name

In this example the device was i2c-1

Setup udev for the velleman device

Now we create a device alias called velleman instead of the silly i2c-1 and change access rights to it so that all users can access it.

Go to this directory

cd /etc/udev/rules.d

create a new text file called 05-local.rules I use nano (I hate vi).

nano 05-local.rules

Make just this one line.

KERNEL="i2c-1",                 SYMLINK="velleman", MODE="0666"

Save it cntl-O and quit cntl-X

Load Velleman driver when booting

The Velleman driver needs a little help to get loaded.

In /etc/rc.d/rc.local add these lines.

# Load i2c driver modules for velleman
modprobe i2c-parport
modprobe i2c-dev

Reboot and hope for the best

Velleman Library - libk8000

The library you need is libk8000. You can find it both as sources and RPM here

http://struyve.mine.nu:8080/index.php?block=k8000

The rpm is not very new but it loads fine on Fedora Core 4. Install it with

rpm -ivh libk8000-2.1.2-1.i386.rpm

You can also download it from sources and build it with make && make install

-- KennethLavrsen - 16 Oct 2005