My debian journey continues. I just wanted to relate what i've done today to the experts and check that i'm on the right track.
I have set up another box today. my second, woo.
during the install i chose the 2.4 kernel package, instead of waiting til after it was all up running 2.2 like i did last time. what happened was, the new kernel didn't get all the modules for various hardware including the NICs so when i rebooted i lost all networking functionality.
google is my friend so eventually i found out that the debian equiv of kudzu is called 'discover' so i installed that and ran it and everything was sweet, NICs working as expected - until i rebooted. *scratches head* well that wasn't right, it hasn't detected the hardware again.
more googling and i found out about the update-rc.d command. this is a good thing, it makes the symlinks from init.d to the various rcrunlevel.d dirs. initially it told me that the symlinks for discover were in place but they were only in rcS.d (another new concept to me) so i went update-rc.d discover remove then update-rc.d discover defaults and now it seems everything is sweet, i got networking up on reboot.
i guess my question is, because i've not had to deal with this before on any distro, is it normal to run hardware detection every time at boot using discover? have my mandrake/redhat boxen been doing this all along without me realising? it's just that i kind of thought once you've installed hardware, it's there and the system shouldn't have to "discover" it each time.
but then again i've always been impressed with being able to take the HD out of a working linux box and put it in another totally differently configured box and have it work pretty much without trouble (*biff*kapow* take that Mr Gates :) so maybe it does and i've answered my own question.
ah feck, it's late and the bottle of red was damn fine. :)
cheers,
..S.ı
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