Previously Eric Richardson wrote:
I give it to you that by hand editing files such as modules.conf or the
files in the /etc/modutils dir that there is no problem to solve.
Ok, so we can agree that the basic modutils setup is sane.
Installing and configuring modules is the hardest thing I have found
using Linux as it requires hardware knowledge etc. The program modconf
in Debian gives a nice interface to load modules and it puts the entries
of modules selected into /etc/modules and puts the options to the
modules (eg. options sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1) in the /etc/modules.conf
file. So far *no* hand editing has been done and for the most part, the
great advantage in this area is that the preinst, postinst scripts of
the packaging do a great job of making things just work.
So it seems the problem is that modconf basically takes the wrong
approach. What should be done instead is use a tool that asks `which
driver should implement your first ethernet card' and then add an
alias for eth0 in a file in /etc/modutils. It can then also use
templates for each nic type with the right 2.2/2.4 kernel settings
when needed.