asm/types.h not found

I see I'm not the first person to have this problem because someone got the same error installing VirtualBox, but that post was locked. So here goes:

I'm trying to compile a device driver module that I wrote but the linux header files keep looking for the "asm" include folder which has been replaced by the "asm-generic" folder. If I edit all the header files that refer to asm I eventually come to a problem with spinlocks needing architecture-specific stuff.

I'm out of my depth here, and finding it a little frustrating because I only wrote a kernel module driver because I could not compile my userspace driver because it needed a more up-to-date version of libusb than the one available in the Trisquel repository. (I didn't want to try installing a newer version myself because of unknown dependencies.)

I'm using version 3.12.11-gnu because I wanted support for a high-resolution screen. Both versions of my driver compile and work fine under Mint 16, but I really want to stay in Trisquel all the time and not have to boot Mint when I want to use my driver. I have DuckDuckGoed it, but the answers are either "update your kernel source", or else suggestions which do not work.

Have any kernel gurus here got the answer please? Thank you in advance. And by the way, Google is not my friend thank you.