Michael Stone wrote:
On Fri, Nov 08, 2002 at 11:57:56AM -0700, Eric Richardson wrote:The problem I am trying to solve in this. Anyone using a laptop that installed or upgraded to woody that decided to update to 2.4 series kernel would have had to used the modules.conf file language to make both the 2.2 and the 2.4 kernel to work. Normally it is nice to have aI don't understand why upgrading from 2.2 to to 2.4 on a laptop involves touching /etc/modules at all. I don't have anything in /etc/modules having anything to do with pcmcia (I assume that's what you mean by the laptop reference?)
I can't say for sure as I don't exactly understand how /etc/modutils works but I can tell you from a user standpoint. When installing Debian you get to the module loading stage and you can select modules. This is the modconf tool. I remember having to select tulip_cb for 2.2 as an ethernet module. When upgrading the kernel to 2.4.x via apt I couldn't get the ethernet to work. I did some poking around and found that Linus wrote yenta_socket and I'm assuming so the standard ethernet drivers would work when using cardbus as on a laptop. As such I needed to select yenta_socket via modconf as perhaps a user would do - or via adding an entry to /etc/modules. I also had to select tulip instead of tulip_cb so this means the tulip_cb(card bus specific driver) is now obsolete for 2.4 kernel at least to my understanding.
Obviously, this whole problem and possible improvements to make it easier is a little more difficult than I thought.
For the record, I am not against hand editing files at all since this is the fastest most straight forward solution to configuration. I do believe that the automated tools such as installer and the tools users may use instead of hand editing should do the same thing if possible.
This is one of the pluses of XML config files. If the file validates on input then it does not matter whether the edit was done by hand or by tool as the structure is in the file. This is off topic I suppose but some of the other response about Yast and hand editing prompted me to comment.
Eric