Hardware detection & installer

[Nikolai Prokoschenko <nikolai@prokoschenko.de>]

Hello!

A friend of mine approached me a couple of days ago and asked whether
the new Debian installer will be able to detect his NVidia graphic
card. I really didn't know what to reply, as I know discover1/2 will
certainly be able to detect it, but this wouldn't yield any
XFree86 configuration, as it is not a part of d-i but of the X
packages. 

My question is: how should I handle such request, or maybe there could
be some solution in Debian for this? My thoughts are:

1. Something in the installer should automagically install appropriate
   drivers, if a "proprietary" video card is detected. A good approach
   found to the archives newly in form of nvidia-kernel-2.4.24-1-*
   packages. Does anybody know, if this becomes a common practise in
   the future?

2. X packages could somehow query discover (please excuse my ignorance
   in this subject) and create initial setup accordingly. 

I guess, UserLinux people will also have to solve this problem, are
there any thoughts and ideas out there?

Thank you.

-- 
Nikolai Prokoschenko 
nikolai@prokoschenko.de / Jabber: pronik@jabber.org