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 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.
To launch HardDrake, you can start it from:
Control Center: just click on the
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
-> -> sub-menu.After a wait screen (indicating the detection process), you will see a window like figure 16-9.
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.
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 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".
At the top of the window, a menu provides four items. First is the
menu with four actions. is used to write a system report to disk. is used to load the report file generated. and let the user restart and exit HardDrake, respectively.The second item, the
menu, is for configuring HardDrake. The first menu entry, , allows to disable some tests and to configure actions associated with the button and the menu. Hence, you can easily select your preferred configuration program for a hardware category.The last menu is the HardDrake's integrated help.
The HardDrake Wizard is a generic configuration tool. It replaces the former configuration tools etherdrake and sounddrake.
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 figure 16-13 should appear.
button. After a few moments, a window like thisYou 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 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
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 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.
The HardDrake home page (for news, updates, information, etc.)
The HardDrake FTP archive (download HardDrake, old versions, tools)
IsaPnPTools home page (used by the detect library)