I recently had an error crop up with an installation of Linux Mint Debian Edition. When upgrading a kernel, or adding/removing certain software packages, or typing "dkms autoinstall" the following error appeared:
dkms.conf: Error! No 'BUILT_MODULE_NAME' directive specified for record #0. Error! Bad conf file. File: does not represent a valid dkms.conf file.
The error message seemed to be complaining about a file called dkms.conf. Searching for files with that name led me to a file which clearly didn't have a BUILT_MODULE_NAME directive:
/var/lib/dkms/ndiswrapper/1.57/build/dkms.conf
$ cat /var/lib/dkms/ndiswrapper/1.57/build/dkms.conf PACKAGE_NAME="ndiswrapper" PACKAGE_VERSION="1.57" DEST_MODULE_LOCATION[0]="/updates" AUTOINSTALL="yes"
This file came from the package ndiswrapper-dkms, so purging the package cleared out the problem and allowed modules to be built once again.
dpkg --purge ndiswrapper-dkms