Questions[makefile](ubuntu)

I know this is a silly question, but since I am trying so hard to learn linux by myself, I need some help from you fellows.

I found this task on the internet and I am trying to solve it but I don't understand exactly how can I use makefiles in linux and how can I create them.

Let's suppose my print working directory is /home/george/Documents

I want to create a makefile which does the following:

1. Displays a message as follows "hello work, today is Sun". Sun comes from Sunday. So I must use date command in this make file to display just first three letters.

2. compress /etc/hosts in /tmp using gzip (probably here should be something like

   gzip -c SOURCE DESTINATION # ?? 
   

Cheers

I want to create a makefile that will compile my objects and name them according to the Linux distro (e.g. Suse, RedHat, or Ubuntu). How can I detect if the OS is Ubuntu or not?

I am using Ubuntu 12.04. I wrote a simple hello world kernel module (hello.c). I wrote the folllowing makefile for it:

obj-m+=hello.o
KDIR:= /usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-24-generic-pae
all:
     $(MAKE) -C $(KDIR) SUBDIRS=$(PWD) modules
clean:
     rm -rf *.o *.ko *.mod.* *.symvers *.order 

But this error cropped up when I did make from kernel:

make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.2.0-24-generic-pae'
make[2]: *** No rule to make target `arch/x86/tools/relocs.c', needed
by `arch/x86/tools/relocs'.  Stop.

hello.c and makefile are in /Documents/module_prog. I ran make from that directory.

What is causing this error and how can I fix it?

In short while I run the make command it says:

nir@nir:~/Downloads/xf86-video-intel-2.17.0$ make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.

I looked inside the folder-xf86-video-intel-2.17.0 and there is a file named "Makefile.in" it supposed to be a in file, right?

I am packaging something for my PPA. The upstream source is a .tar.gz archive which is Makefile-based.

Since this package has a significant amount of architecture-independent data, it would be wise to have the build scripts generate two packages:

• package
• package-data

How can I set this up? I've edited my Debian control file to generate two packages, but I have no idea how to get the right files to the right package.

Since the data files are currently all installed via the Makefile, I am kind of lost here.