Re: Why so many HW detection packages?
On Fri, 2002-04-26 at 15:15, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>
> Debian seem to have lots of HW detection packages. I've noticed the
> following (which one did I forget?):
>
> pciutils
This is a very basic set of utilities for doing interesting things with
the PCI bus. It's presence is required for some of the others to work.
> libdetect0
This is Mandrake's old hardware detection system, which appears to be
orphaned upstream.
> mdetect
This is a utility that detects what kind of mouse you have. It's used
by the X server packages to autodetect your mouse.
> discover-data, discover
This is Progeny's fork of Mandrake's detect system. It is, I believe,
much more up-to-date, and is very useful. It is also used by the X
server packages to autodetect video cards.
[Disclaimer: I work for Progeny; infer what bias you may.]
> kudzu, kudzu-vesa
This is a port of Red Hat's hardware detection system.
> hwdata
No idea.
> hotplug-utils, hotplug
These utilities are used for hot-pluggable hardware, such as USB and
FireWire/i.Link/whatever. They complement more "static" hardware
detection systems that configure permanently-attached hardware like PCI
cards.
> read-edid
This utility reads Plug and Play information from monitors that support
the standard. It's used by the X server packages to autoconfigure your
monitor. It only works on i386, as I recall.
> Some of them will only detect and report hardware, some of them try to
> load kernel modules and/or change the configuration and some of them
> only have lists of HW available. Can all of these packages safely be
> installed on the same machine?
I can vouch for the following combination, which I have installed on all
of my machines:
pciutils, mdetect, discover[-data], hotplug[-utils], read-edid
> There also seem to be some overlap in the HW databases included:
>
> **** libdetect0 ****
> /usr/share/detect/pci.lst
> /usr/share/detect/pcmcia.lst
> /usr/share/detect/isa.lst
> /usr/share/detect/usb.lst
> **** discover-data ****
> /usr/share/discover/pci.lst
> /usr/share/discover/pcmcia.lst
> /usr/share/discover/usb.lst
As mentioned before, discover is a fork of Mandrake detect, so this
overlap is not surprising.
> Perhaps these packages should be synchronized?
As mentioned before, detect appears to be orphaned upstream, so syncing
with discover appears to be out of the question. I have no idea about
the others.
> Which package is the best package to install on a freshly installed
> Debian/Woody box? I want to get all supported HW working out of the
> box?
I have had great success with the list of packages I listed above, along
with pcmcia-cs if you need PCMCIA support.
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