Debian Hardware detection


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Thread: Debian Hardware detection

  1. #1
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    Debian Hardware detection

    I have been looking at installing Debian and have read that it does not automatically detect hardware on installation. How do you get hardware recognised? Is installation of Debian much harder than a distro such as Mandrake or RedHat?

  2. #2
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    it is easy to get the bass system installed, hard disk partition, timezone etc. But you have to manually set up and make your hardware work. Debian do it this way, why I don't know. But if you want hardware detection, go mandrake or redhat.
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  3. #3
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    Debian doesn't recognize your hardware indeed. But if you know what hardware is in your system this isn't necessarily a problem. All the hardware support goes through modules. And after you've installed your system, run 'modconf' as root. This will give you a hierarchical view of your modules, and you'll be able to select the ones you need. This also automatically adds these modules to /etc/modules, so they'll run on bootup.

    It's dated in comparison with other distro's. And you'll most likely want to upgrade to testing (or otherwise you'll be running a very old set of apps, for which only security fixes are released, not new features). But personally, I wouldn't want to run on anything else.

  4. #4
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    Thks, I really want to tyr debian but maybe I'll hold off until the next release. Any ideas when this might be? I couldn't find this info on debian.org

    I looked at progeny.com but doesn't look suitable to my needs. And it's commercial...I thought one of the main ideas behind debian is it is non commercial...? Correct me if I'm wrong


  5. #5
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    Originally posted by cheeky_zombie:
    <STRONG>Thks, I really want to tyr debian but maybe I'll hold off until the next release. Any ideas when this might be? I couldn't find this info on debian.org</STRONG>
    Well Woody is currently frozen but don't really know when it will become stable. Just in case this is the reason you want the next release, it won't have hardware detection either. If you want more recent and updated packages why not go ahead and install woody now or even sid (unstable), except for the few occasionally broken packages, sid really isn't that unstable at all.
    <STRONG>I looked at progeny.com but doesn't look suitable to my needs. And it's commercial...I thought one of the main ideas behind debian is it is non commercial...? Correct me if I'm wrong</STRONG>
    Yes, one of the goals of Debian is to be completely volunteer based and non-commercial, but Progeny isn't Debian, it's Progeny. It's based on Debian but is not Debian itself. There have been other commercial distros based on Debian before including Corel and Storm. They are based on Debian but are not Debian.

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  6. #6
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    apt-get install discover

    Package: discover
    Priority: optional
    Section: admin
    Maintainer: Branden Robinson &lt;branden@debian.org&gt;
    Architecture: i386
    Version: 1.0-2
    Description: Hardware detection system
    Discover is a hardware detection system based on the libdiscover library.
    Discover provides a flexible interface that programs can use to report a wide
    range of information about the hardware that is installed on a Linux system.
    In addition to reporting information, Discover includes support for doing
    hardware detection at boot time. Detection occurs in two stages: The first
    stage, which runs from an initial ramdisk (initrd), loads just the drivers
    needed to mount the root file system, and the second stage loads the rest
    (ethernet cards, sound cards, etc.).
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