Re: redesigning the debian installer
> > The good thing about PCI hardware detection is that there is no probing,
> > and the PCI layer/driver handles allocation an IRQ and I/O. So basically
> > the gist is, atleast include PCI detection, which maps PCI device ID's to
> > modules, and can prompt for which ones to load.
>
> Right. We already do PCI hardware detection, after all, for video card
> setup with anXious.
>
> Maybe that's all the hardware detection we should bother with. Is there
> really any point in worrying about making life easier for owners of ISA
> hardware these days?
Detection of most modern hardware can be done with a few lines of shell
script an an ascii database of pci and pnp id's. Cdroms can normally
be detected by grepping kernel messages.
The few devices left out can be asked interactively or autodected by a C
library only if the user chooses to try it.
I would like also to remember a small utility, read-edid, which can be
used by the X configurator to retrieve the monitor model and frequencies
from the monitor itself. It can be found at http://www.altern.org/vii/
If we know the pci id of the card, the monitor frequencies and leave the
mouse configuration to gpm we can configure X almost automatically.
--
Massimo Dal Zotto
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