16.5. Configuring Your Hardware

16.5.1. Introduction

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:

  1. A main tool called harddrake, used to configure hardware by launching:

  2. A HardDrake Wizard or external configuration tool(s) (which can be configured).

16.5.2. harddrake

16.5.2.1. Description

When was the last time you had to install a new sound card on your GNU/Linux system and just could not 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. It automates and simplifies 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 its easy-to-use 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 is not detected, you only need to upgrade detect itself.

16.5.2.2. Usage

To launch HardDrake, you can start it from:

  • Control Center: just click on the HardDrake icon.

  • a terminal: type harddrake. In a terminal, you can also pass parameters to it.

  • GNOME and KDE: go to the start panel. The HardDrake entry is in the Configuration->Hardware->HardDrake sub-menu.

After a wait screen (indicating the detection process), you will see a window like figure 16-9.

Figure 16-9. HardDrake Main Window

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 16-10 shows such a window.

Figure 16-10. HardDrake – Selected Device

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 16-10, we expanded some parts of the tree and selected a device in one of the categories. 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 16-11, 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".

Figure 16-11. HardDrake – Unknown Device

At the top of the window, a menu provides four items. First is the File menu with four actions. Save report file is used to write a system report to disk. 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 configuring HardDrake. The first menu entry, Probing Options, allows to disable some tests and to configure actions associated with the Run Configuration Tool button and the Tools menu. Hence, you can easily select your preferred configuration program for a hardware category.

Figure 16-12. HardDrake – Probing Options Window

The last menu is the HardDrake's integrated help.

16.5.3. HardDrake Wizard

16.5.3.1. Introduction

The HardDrake Wizard is a generic configuration tool. It replaces the former configuration tools etherdrake and sounddrake.

16.5.3.2. Usage

As an example, we will now focus on the sound Wizard.

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 16-13 should appear.

Figure 16-13. HardDrake - Sound Wizard

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 the configuration, press the OK button to test it. Three samples should be played (if MIDI is available and you have a sound card supporting 16 bit DMA channels). If you did not 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 not correctly installed.

An error message may occur because of the following problems:

  • bad settings (I/O, IRQ, DMA, etc.);

  • 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.

16.5.4. Problems/Troubleshooting

If your hardware is not recognized or your system freezes, contact the harddrake team and use the subject "[Detect]" in your e-mail.

If you think it is a bug related to HardDrake (bugs with the user interface), contact the same e-mail address but use "[HardDrake]" as the subject.

16.5.5. Other Information


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