When was the last time you had to install a new sound card on your GNU/Linux system and just couldn't quite get it to work? Sure you know which model it is and can even guess which driver supports it and may even have some idea as to the IRQ DMA and I/O port it uses.
Here comes HardDrake.
HardDrake is a fully GUI-based tool which ties together many of the tools already included in a GNU/Linux distribution to automate and simplify the process of installing new hardware. Some items will be detected, others can be selected from a drop down list. The various I/O, IRQ and such X86 annoyance settings can be adjusted from within this interface.
On one hand, HardDrake is used to display information. On the other hand, it can launch configuration tools as well. With an easy interface, you will be able to browse (hopefully) all the hardware your system consists of.
HardDrake uses the detect library, so if new hardware isn't detected, you often only need to upgrade detect.
To launch HardDrake, you can start it from:
DrakConf: Just click on the HardDrake icon.
a terminal: Type `harddrake', by doing this you can pass along parameters, too.
GNOME and KDE: Go to the start panel. The HardDrake entry is in the Configuration/System group.
After a wait screen (indicating the detection process), you'll see a window like figure 13-1.
On the left, you can see the device tree showing you all categories.
For some categories, you will notice a "[+]" symbol. By clicking on it, this subtree will be expanded and all detected hardware of this category will be listed. figure 13-2 shows such a window.
If you select a device, you will get some useful informations about it. In certain cases you will see a configuration button, that will allow you to configure the selected device. In figure 13-2, we have expanded some parts of the tree and selected a device of one category. On the right you can see informations about the selected card. If you press the Run Configuration tool button, the configuration tool associated with this device appears and lets you configure this card.
There's a special category called "Other Devices", which contains all currently unknown hardware. There is information available on how to help us to add this unknown hardware to our database. By reporting the requested information, you can hope to see your hardware recognized in future versions!
In figure 13-3, you can see a special case where the user is asked to report an ID to the harddrake team. In most cases you will be asked to send the output of a "pnpdump".
At the top of the window, there's a menu providing four items. First, there's the "File" menu with four actions. "Save report file" is used to write a system report to disc. "Load report file" is used to load the report file generated. "Reload" and "Exit" let the user restart and exit HardDrake, respectively.
The second item, the "Options" menu, is useful for configuring HardDrake. The first menu entry "Probing Options" allows both, disabling some tests and configuring actions associated with the Run Configuration Tool button and the "Tools" menu. So you can easily select your preferred configuration program for a category of hardware.
The last menu, is the HardDrake help.