[deletia]
>
> You can do it from user mode, but you must be root.
>
> I think there is a HOWTO on this.
>
> Andrew E. Mileski
Indeed there is. Its in the KHG. Doh! sorry for bandwidth wastage.
Now. What I'm actually working on is a hardware autodetect utility
for Linux. Something along the lines of the Win95 autodetection of
hardware while setting up.
There is a simple reason for this. It would make setting up a
Linux/GNU (keep RS happy my mentioning it like that!!) system a great
deal simpler for the 'personal' user.
The premise is that you start with a completely bog-standard kernel
that talks either IDE(and ATAPI) or SCSI, Floppy and not much more.
At the moment I'm basically pulling the probing mechanisms from all
the various drivers and running through them in user mode.
Now, the way I see it, I can do the autodetection in one of 3 ways.
1. A user-mode app that goes tromping through the I/O bus regions
probing for this and that. This has the advantage of making the
utility readily available and useable by 'distribution' vendors.
I really dislike this idea cos I've tried it and found that for
instance, probing for a 3c503 messes up my WD8013 ethernet card so
that it no longer answers up for probes without a hard reset.)
It also has the disadvantage that it will require a great deal of
fiddling to make sure things are probed for in the correct order. And
even then there's no guarantee of 100% accuracy and reliablity
2. An actual autodetection 'driver' or module. I think (but I may be
wrong) that this might be a little safer than running it in user mode
but will probably suffer from the same drawbacks as mentioned above.
3. Do it ala NT or 95. load a driver module, see if it gets a hit and
then unload it and move on to the next module. I absolutely hate this
brain dead method :>
I'd appreciate peoples comments and thoughts on this. I think it would
be a very worthwhile project that would eventually lead to a much
larger userbase for linux as a desktop OS.
Regards
JoeV.
--
Joe Vaughan / joev@autodealing.com / +353 1 6766455
" ! Cannot store The Internet in the recycle bin... "
-- Windows 95 hints that the 'Infobahn' may not
be environmentally friendly