Malcolm Carlock wrote: > I guess my only wonderment is why these utilities aren't installed by > default. Good question. But the problem is how to do that? Certainly the new kernel you are installing does not *require* the 'discover' package to be installed. So the kernel package can't list it as a Depends: because people not wanting discover would rightfully call that a bug. So how would this get installed automatically on an upgrade? http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html I suppose this could be documented more visibly in the upgrade release notes for the new kernel. I looked through the above guide and find that discover and hotplug are mentioned in the sound configuration only. I would prefer if this were documented as recommended in the kernel upgrade section. I just filed Bug#324401 with this addition suggestion for the release notes. Users upgrading from a non-modular bootstrapping linux kernel such as the Woody installer boot-floppies 2.4.18-bf24 kernel may need to specify driver modules to be loaded for their hardware when upgrading to the newer moduler 2.6 series kernel. The 'discover' and 'hotplug' packages are useful to detect hardware and to automatically load the required modules. It is recommended to install those packages prior to upgrading to a linux 2.6 kernel. The 'udev' package is also useful in conjunction with the linux 2.6 kernel the /dev directory. But see the warnings below in the section "Switching to 2.6 may activate udev" for more detail. Anyone installing a new Debian installation using the new debian-installer will get discover and hotplug installed by default. It is a new installation without any history. The installer puts it there by default. After that further customization is allowed by the admin. So this problem really only affects upgrades from a non-modular kernel to a modular kernel. I can't say most but everyone *should have* upgraded to a modular kernel in Woody and manually specified the drivers they needed in /etc/modules. But for those that didn't and are now upgrading from Woody to Sarge and find that all of the kernels in Sarge are modular they are now finding this problem on upgrades. Bob
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