How about installing new hardware AFTER system installation?

[Thomas Beckett]

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 21:37:42 +0100, Eric Feliksik <milouny at gmx.net> wrote:
> mmealman wrote:
> > This isn't an Ubuntu issue so much as a Linux configuration issue.
> Of course, that's true.
> 
> > [...]
> 
> > But let's say you swap where your HDs are in your drive bay. That will
> > swap the drive letters and cause your fstab file to be wrong. Your
> No surprise, yes :)
> 
> > sound card should work pretty much automatically and so should your
> > mouse if the mouse protocol being used it compatible to your last one.
> That's my point! If you use a mouse with another protocol the X.org
> config is not automatically changed, is it?
> 
> >
> > So to answer your question, if the hardware is supported by the Linux
> > kernel you can unplug, replug, swap, and so on to your heart's content
> > and Linux will happily load the needed module. But if the hardware
> > requires a different config from your old hardware, you'll need to
> > tweak.
> 
> Okay, so the situation is as follows (correct me if I'm wrong): On
> install, Ubuntu detects hardware and sets up configuration files
> accordingly. After that, hotplugged (usb) things can be configured
> automitically. If some hardware is added/changed and it needs a
> different configuration than the previous/existing hardware, it needs
> manual tweaking.
> 
> You also say mouses and soundcards are almost never a problem. How about
> videocards? They don't automatically work, since X.org's config will be
> plain wrong. Am I right? What could be done about this?


I dont know if they are automatically done now but surely any that are
not (video cards etc that require changes to config files) can be
sorted by having a script that runs early in the boot process. It
could fork to allow booting to continue then scan hardware - poping up
a curses terminal if any changes are noticed or running the relevent
dpkg-reconfigure command. just before X initialises - it could check
if the hardware changes detector has finished before going ahead.
Might work (i know nothing about how to implement such a thing! except
putting a script that calls a hardware detector - whatever one is used
in the install process - into the init directory). The only problem is
that depending on what it scans for, it could add a considerable
amount of time to the boot process, somehting that would be unlikely
to be implemented as most people will only change such hardware very
infrequently. Maybe a small scan for essential hardware changes, then
somewhere the user can select a nice gui for other hardware chaanges
such as soundcards, nics etc that wont stop the boot process.The
alternative would be that if X init fails then trap that somehow and
run the checker/reconfigurator then.

Tom