title: Installing dkms onto an Ubuntu machine that doesn't have a compiler
body: <p>I'm trying to install <em>dkms</em> onto machines that have no <em>make</em> or <em>gcc</em>.
  I plan to push only binaries to those target machines.</p>
  
  <p>On my build machine I plan to use <em>dkms</em> to build <em>dkms</em>-enabled modules and then use <code>dkms mktarball ... --binaries-only</code> to create tarballs for distribution.</p>
  
  <p>I want to push those tarballs to target machines, and on those machines I
  want to use <code>dkms ldtarball</code>, and so the target machines do need <em>dkms</em>,
  but they don't need <em>gcc</em> (or <em>make</em>).</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Build (host) and target machines run the same Ubuntu</li>
  <li><code>apt-get install dkms</code> on the target automatically brings in <em>gcc</em></li>
  <li>Downloading the <em>dkms.deb</em> (<code>apt-get download dkms</code>)and installing it with <code>dpkg --install --ignore-depends=gcc ... dkms.deb</code>
  does work, but leaves the dependency unresolved so that any future <em>apt-get</em> (installing some other package for instance) fails.</li>
  <li>I can try to use the <em>equiv</em> package to create dummy installations of <em>gcc</em> and <em>make</em>, but this seems like an awful hack I'd prefer to avoid.  Also it could create problems if I ever want to actually install
  gcc on the target in the future.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>There's a note about this in the dkms README (section 3), but no guidance on how to accomplish it.
  "If you choose not to load module source on your system or if you choose not to load a
  compiler ... DKMS can still be used to install modules.".</p>
  
  <p>(sorry if the tags are misleading ... there's no tag available for <em>dkms</em>)</p>