Re: A newbie's view

["Seth M. Landsman" <seth@job.cs.brandeis.edu>]

> > 	Furthermore, as more hardware is supported, and more people who
> > don't know the different between an adaptec 2940 and 1940 SCSI card try to
> > configure the kernel, wouldn't it be nice if a more reasonable (and
> > correct) defaults be detected?
> > 
> That's easy, just load all the SCSI drivers until you find one that fits.
> 
> With the exception of soundcards, which need IRQ and DMA autodetection,
> Linux already is better than anybody else I can think of WRT autodetection
> of hardware.

	Okay, a couple of points here ...  I know we could probably
autodetect by loading modules.  That's great.  In terms of an end-user it
bites hard though.  My Dad isn't going to sit there and do `insmod blah ;
lsmod ; rmmod blah ; reboot` until something works.  This should be done
automagically.  This also doesn't help if I want to build a monolithic
kernel, instead of module based.

	What I'm still looking for is a way to do `make autodetect-config`
previous to `make [x|menu|]config` which will give me a .config file with
whatever can be autodetected autodetected.  This may not be a huge task,
but I think it is necessary.

> > 	I'd almost be willing to dig into one or both of these (though my
> > supply of tuits is always dangerously low).
> > 
> Same here, same here... especially the round ones. I have an oversupply of
> square tuits, however, which tend to lie on the floor and hurt when I
> accidentally step on them. Anybody willing to trade? ;-)

	Those triangular ones are the worst.  Although, if you find a
polygon tuit with enough sides it starts to approximate a round one.  And
if you breed them, you'll manage to have really round ones in no time!

	(I'm going to be upset if no one gets the reference ...)

	:)

-Seth
--
"It is by will alone I set my mind in motion"
-
Linux-future: thinking about the future of the Linux kernel
http://humbolt.nl.linux.org/lists/