A question about the "how to make it work" issue of my week.

[Justin Dugger]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 6:58 AM, David Nicol <davidnicol at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 5:31 PM, Oren Beck <orenbeck at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Can anyone direct me to an explanation of how/why an installed from
>> Live distro seems to lack the auto detect on startup properties ?
>
> This issue is yet another example of  free software only working as
> well as it needs to to satisfy the needs of whoever has the expertise
> to improve it.
>
> I was pleasantly surprised at the autorecognition ability of slax.
> Have you tried Slax, instead of knoppix?

Ubuntu has some pretty good stuff coming up at the end of the month:
* the new X configuration is based on HAL and should autodetect a lot of stuff
* a USB image creation GUI to transfer a read only LiveCD .iso to a
writable usb stick (it seems Fedora's had one for some time, but will
hopefully be useful for more than just one release)

At least with Ubuntu, debian-installer is what the LiveCD uses, so no
"extra" autodetect will be available. I don't pretend to know how
Knoppix or Slax installs. The primary problem with autodetection is
that it can take forever to run through the rules.  There is an ever
increasing amount of hardware out there, and so Linux has an
increasing amount of drivers.  Unfortunately, this means that while
computers are also getting faster, any given computer will boot slower
and slower as the number of kernel modules grow over time.

The other difficulty is that some devices cannot be detected.  For
example, some very old monitors don't support communicating device
information like resolution and dot clocks. These are also the most
prone to damage if you drive them wrong! And some monitors that do
communicate are wrong.  Another example is serial connected wacom
tablets, common in TabletPCs.  The best you can do is discover the
laptop model and enable wacom based on that.

Justin Dugger