The harddrake project has been developed to simplify hardware configuration under GNU/Linux by providing an easy-to-use interface.
harddrake is composed of two parts,
A main tool called harddrake, used to configure hardware by launching
a harddrake Wizard or external configuration tool(s) (which can be configured).
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 your new hardware isn't detected, you only need to upgrade detect itself.
To launch harddrake, you can start it from:
Control Center: Just click on the HardDrake icon.
a terminal: Type harddrake, doing it this way you can pass parameters, as well.
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 14-8.
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, the subtree will be expanded and all detected hardware of this category will be listed. figure 14-9 shows such a window.
If you select a device, you will get some useful information about it. In some cases you will see a configuration button, which will allow you to configure the selected device. In figure 14-9, we have expanded some parts of the tree and selected a device of one category. On the right you can see information 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 is a special category called "Other Devices", which contains all currently unknown hardware in your system. 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 14-10, 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 for for configuring harddrake. The first menu entry "Probing Options" allows for the disabling of some tests and for 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.
The harddrake Wizard is a generic configuration tool. It replaces the former configuration tools etherdrake and sounddrake.
As an example we'll focus on the Sound-Wizard now.
The Wizard, if available for a certain component class, is launched from harddrake by pressing the Run Configuration Tool button. After a few moments, a window like this figure 14-12 should appear.
You can change the current selection, but in most cases it is not a good idea, as the detected device is already highlighted. For an ISA card you need to specify the I/O and IRQ settings if the values proposed by default are not correct. After checking configuration, press the OK button to test the configuration. Three samples should be played (if MIDI is available and you have a sound-card supporting 16 bit DMA channels). If you didn't hear them without any error messages, it may be due to one of the following reasons:
Your speaker volume is too low.
A hardware problem, maybe your sound-card is damaged?
Your sound-card is installed incorrectly.
An error message may occur because of the following problems:
Bad settings (I/O, IRQ, DMA ...).
Old sound modules from another configuration are still in memory. In this case, unload them by running "modprobe -r <module_name>" from a terminal.
If you heard proper sound samples, you can press OK to confirm the configuration. Check sound configuration by starting a program which uses sound (specially from a non-root account). After these tests, you should reboot your system and check that the modules are loaded correctly at boot time.
If your hardware isn't recognized or your system freezes, contact the harddrake team and use the subject "[Detect]".
If you think it's a bug related to harddrake (bugs with the user interface), contact the same email address but use "[harddrake]" as the subject.
The harddrake home page (for news, updates, information ...)
The harddrake FTP archive (download harddrake, old versions, tools)
IsaPnPTools home page (used by the detect library)