tar -tjf compat-wireless-3.6.8-1.tar.bz2 | head -10 md5sum compat-wireless-3.6.8-1.tar.bz2 A valid tarball will extract a directory named compat-wireless-3.6.8-1/ containing Makefile , compat/ , drivers/ , etc.
For any current system (kernel 4.x+), use the modern backports package instead: compat-wireless-3.6.8-1.tar.bz2 download
git clone https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/backports/backports.git Once downloaded, the typical build process is: tar -tjf compat-wireless-3