For the compilation of the Plustek driver, the Linux kernel sources
have to be installed. Without them the compilation of the Plustek
driver will fail, sometimes even with 'weird' complaints such as kernel
being to old and such, even if it isn't. With many distributions
(e.g. Mandrake 7.2) the kernel sources are automatically installed
with every standard installation.
With other distributions (e.g. SuSE 7.2)
this is not the case and you will have to install the kernel sources
manually. You can do this of course again from the distribution.
For this, you will normally use the standard installation tool of
your distribution, e.g. the yast in case of the above mentioned
SuSE. At this point you may find, that taking a look into the handbook
of your distribution might be worth the visit, or you might be installing
something that look like the kernel source and is described as kernel
source, but which isn't. In the above mentioned SuSE you will also
find, that the real kernel sources are not in the packet
series called 'source packages'. Again, best look into the handbook!
After successfully installing the kernel sources, there should be
some (nonempty) subdirectory under /usr/src, called e.g.
linux-2.4.4.SuSE in case of the SuSE 7.2 distribution or
somewhat similar just linux-2.*.* or just outright linux.
Also the kernel sources are fairly large. The size of the source
tree of kernel 2.4.9 is 169 megabytes! You can check the size easily like
this:
Welcome to SuSE Linux 7.2 (i386) - Kernel 2.4.9 (tty2). mathplanet login: root Password: Last login: Sun Sep 23 10:03:05 on tty2 Have a lot of fun... mathplanet:~ # cd /usr/src mathplanet:/usr/src # ls -la total 24 drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Sep 21 17:27 . drwxr-xr-x 20 root root 4096 Aug 24 10:23 .. lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 Sep 21 17:27 linux -> linux-2.4.9 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Sep 22 06:57 linux-2.4.4.SuSE drwxr-xr-x 14 1046 101 4096 Sep 22 06:59 linux-2.4.7 drwxr-xr-x 14 1046 101 4096 Sep 22 09:07 linux-2.4.9 drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Jul 18 14:57 packages mathplanet:/usr/src # du -h linux-2.4.9 68k linux-2.4.9/fs/msdos 288k linux-2.4.9/fs/proc 200k linux-2.4.9/fs/minix 184k linux-2.4.9/fs/isofs 268k linux-2.4.9/fs/nfs [snip] 172k linux-2.4.9/Documentation/usb 16k linux-2.4.9/Documentation/ia64 16k linux-2.4.9/Documentation/sparc 20k linux-2.4.9/Documentation/parisc 12k linux-2.4.9/Documentation/cris 16k linux-2.4.9/Documentation/mips 16k linux-2.4.9/Documentation/power 5.3M linux-2.4.9/Documentation 169M linux-2.4.9 mathplanet:/usr/src #where I snipped out some of the output in the middle. The whole source tree make up 169 megabytes, as can be seen in the last line of the output of du. So if you kernel source size is only a few megabytes, it probably isn't the real source.