Hello, I just installed KaOS on a tablet, and the WiFi card does not work. This was expected, and was remedied in an Ubunto install by following the instructions here to install the driver:
https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723bu/commit/07eef04134e67488dffa0d91289ac9a654835793

But I run though this in KaOS, and when I get to the part of running "make" it tells me a bunch of the files are of unrecognized types (sorry I don't have the output, but it's off-net; definitely the .o files, and I think also the .c). I tried "make clean", but that didn't seem to change anything.

Is there a next step I can take to get this working? The wireless card is the only internet connection on this tablet, so installing a bunch of packages isn't currently an option (I haven't yet decided I'm desperate enough to buy a USB ethernet connector).

Make sure to use KaOS compatible instructions to install drivers (never go outside of the package manager pacman), see https://kaosx.us/docs/package/
But you will always need some kind of internet access to get new drivers. If you have another system available, you could build the driver on that install, move it to an external (US😎 device, then pacman -U it onto your tablet from the USB.

O.k. So am I on the right track here? I have a zip file from which I extract, make & make install in another distro. Here I need to make a copy of PKGBUILD.proto and fill it out with all the proper variables to get it to extract and install from the zip file when I run makepkg?

Is there something that actually prevents make from working normally in KaOS, or is this just a best practices thing?

You need a KaOS based install to use a PKGBUILD, and as the guide shows you, the PKGBUILD runs all the needed to build a package (make, cmake, meson based or whatever your package needs/uses). Drivers will almost all have an existing PKGBUILD , example, so make sure to read and follow the guide.

O.k. so the example helped a lot, and I jumped through the hoops of package creation, but end up right back at the "File format not recognized" issue once I get the package far enough along to invoke make.
makepkg results

PKGBUILD file

Before anyone goes tearing apart the PKGBUILD line for line, I also booted a live USB onto another computer with working wifi, ran "pacman -Su", git cloned the unadulterated example package, and got the same issue running makepkg on that machine.

Seems to be an issue with newer elfutils (their solution is nonsense, no other driver in KaOS has an issue with latest elfutils, including some [rtl wifi](https://github.com/KaOSx/main/blob/master/rtl8192eu-next/PKGBUILD, so not an Arch only issue:
https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8723bu/issues/125

And if a solution is found for the file error, make sure to adjust the PKGBUILD, line 27 & 28 for KaOS, firmware is not in /usr/lib here, it is in /lib, so remove the usr part twice.

Oh, look at that... GitHub has a forum.

Thank you for your patience. i'll bother them over there for a little bit. if I get it figured out, i'm sure I'll be back to pester you some more. Unfortunately KaOS is a non-starter for this device if I can't get the wifi card working.

Hey, guess where i'm posting this from?
My wirelessly connected KaOS tablet...

A couple notes for when I inevitably have issues with a future re-install:
makepkg & pacman install seemd to go well, but i ended up with:
"modprobe: FATAL: Module 8723bu not found in directory /lib/modules/5.1.15-1"
Even though i was sure to remove the /usr from the PKGBUILD file, apparently not in the copy i ended up importing, so had to catch that and clean it up.
poking around, I noticed that my module was .ko, but all the other ones were .ko.gz, so i added "gzip 8723bu.ko" before the driver install in PKGBUILD.
Not sure if that was necessary, or even a good idea, because it wasn't the fix; that was "depmod", which I was prompted to do after the first install, but had completely forgotten about after all the poking around.

Next week: Touchscreen!