How about installing new hardware AFTER system installation?

[mmealman]

Eric Feliksik 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?
> 

With video cards it depends on the driver. I use nothing but Nvidia
cards and when I upgraded my Geforce 4400 to a Geforce 6800 there was
nothing for me to do except plug in the new card and turn on the PC.
That's because my X11 config file is setup to use the nvidia driver and
that driver works for all Nvidia video cards. ATI has their own driver,
so if I switched from Nvidia to ATI then I'd need to update my X config
to use that driver. Two things would change that, either X could try to
more intelligently detect the card and use the proper module or at
system startup your system could check your hardware and reconfigure
itself if the hardware changed.

The reason why the above hasn't been done yet is because the community
hasn't gotten around to it. Stuff like Kudzu and Hotplugging are both
pretty recent to Linux. To give you an example, 6 or 7 years ago if you
wanted to install a printer under Linux you used lprng to setup your
printer. It was a friggen PITA to work with, setting up a printer under
Linux was one of the harder things to do back then. So someone invented
something better, CUPS, and today setting up a printer under Linux is
easy. Heck, under Fedora Core 3 my HP Laserjet 1300 set itself up. I
didn't have to do anything, it was just there and ready to print when I
finished installing the system.

Sound cards are easier to work with today because we have ALSA. That
was written up around 1999 to clean up Linux's sound structure and it
made Linux much more plug and play friendly with sound cards.

So the goal most definately is "plug it in and it just works", but it
takes time to get there.


-- 
mmealman