Finding devices.

[no-box]

Hi, I'm runnung 'ubuntu' Gutsy Gibbon. Something I miss woth Linux that I used to find usefull in Windows was the 'new hardware wizard/manager'. Is there anything equivilent that I can run when I install some new hardware so the system can identify the new device?
Chhers, Jon aka no-box

[John A]

Not really. Hardware support is usually provided by kernel modules, which means that if they exist on your system, they get autoloaded when the computer starts or sometimes even when new hardware is plugged into a running system. If you don't have the appropriate kernel modules to detect a particular piece of hardware, the system won't be able to figure out what driver is needed anyway, so it's assumed you're going to handle it on your own.

[no-box]

.....How will I know what modules I have/havn't got ?......

[linux]

lspci

lsusb

Basically, use the command line to find the devices you have plugged in and running.

[John A]

>.....How will I know what modules I have/havn't got ?......
More importantly, how do you know which modules you need? :) Basically, you can find out if a particular piece of hardware is detected by running the commands linux gave (or check the output of the dmesg command). If its name is listed there, it's been detected.

If it isn't detected, you need to do research to find out how support is provided for that piece of hardware (generally it requires you having to either recompile the kernel or compile and install a software package which will result in a module).

Finally, you can manually load a module with the modprobe command (as root). In a terminal, you would type modprobe module_name . If it doesn't give any errors, it's been loaded successfully. If it says that it doesn't exist, you most likely don't have the module installed.

[linux]

If its name is listed there, it's been detected.

*cough* Unless you're ME, and your output of lsusb does nothing... *cough*

[DimaYasny]

another few things to go for:
fdisk -l to detect unmounted drives
look in the /proc directory - it contains a lot of online hardware information
dmesg will show the hardware detected during boot
kudzu (not sure ubuntu has it, RHEL sure does)

[John A]

>dmesg will show the hardware detected during boot

Well, dmesg displays kernel messages. For example, I can plug in my Firewire drive after I boot, and it's always listed when I run dmesg | tail .

[DimaYasny]

no argument there, you can get the same by using something like
watch cat /var/log/messages