Install packages automatically based on the detected hardware
Would you like to have gtkpod installed automatically if an ipod is in
the machine? Or 915resolution if your video card is supported by it?
Or perhaps mpt-status if your RAID controller uses the mptscshih
kernel module? Until yesterday, this was not possible in Debian. Now
it is.
Recently, I have worked on extending the discover (v2) package to
handle a mapping from hardware to debian packaages. The changes are
in unstable, and the program to run to test it is discover-pkginstall.
It will look at the available hardware, and present a debconf
multiselect list of packages to install.
But for this to be useful, a database of hardware->package mappings
need to be updated. At the moment a few entries are listed in the
discover-data package, but I am sure more of them. If you know some
debian packages that is useful or required to use a specific piece of
hardware, please report a wishlist bug against discover-data
specifying the hardware id (PCI, USB, SBus, etc.) and the package
name. I am mostly interested in packages in main, but also packages
in contrib and non-free are interesting.
I hope to have this feature integrated into debian-installer before
etch, so useful hardware related packages can be installed
automatically on request.
Friendly,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
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