For the inexperienced Linux user I think this poses the greatest problem. After 6 months of using Linux I'm still having fun trying to get a
14GB Exabyte 8mm SCSI streamer to work. On another machine at work we had no problems archiving onto a HP 10GB Taravan IDE drive. Although
the driver support from many of the different distributions is very good there are still a few components that are a bit more difficult to
get going. Under Linux a driver is called a module, & a piece of hardware, like a HDD, is called a device. We installed Suse 7.0 on a
friends computer, Gigabyte GA-7IEX4 mainboard, 800 MHz. AMD CPU, Nvidia Geforce2 256 GTS AGP graphic card, Fritz ISDN card,
Sound Blaster sound card, Adaptec 2940 SCSI card,...... & all the cards were correctly identified & the basic configuration was carried out without any problems.
Suse Linux also recognised the AMD chipset on the mainboard & had no problem initialising it.
Another very interesting feature regarding the modules (hardware drivers) is that they can be loaded by the kernel when they are
needed & unloaded when the kernel is finished using that piece of hardware. For example there is no need to have a streamer module
permanently attached to the kernel when the streamer is only needed maybe once a day. Through the careful use of these loadable modules you can
further fine tune the kernel & save resources. It makes little sense to make a SCSI card module loadable when there are HDDs attached to it, but
if there was only a CD-ROM & a streamer on that card then why not. No need to carry all that excess baggage around with you :o)
Each distribution generally comes with set of configuration tools (the exception being the really hardcore Unix distributions like FreeBSD)
which help you to configure your computer. The yast tool from Suse enables you to configure almost all hardware & also many important software &
boot operations. All the system configuration files are to be found in the /etc directory & can easily be modified either using the configuration
tools supplied or by simply using a text editor (like vi). With a little experience you will be defining HDD partitions faster in the
"hardcore editor mode" than you can do it with the config. tools.
One fascinating feature of Linux is that for many of the configuration changes that you make there is no need to reboot the machine! Too many
other OS's don't have this possibility & you are forced to sit in front of the computer for a half an hour while it reboots for every little
piece of hardware that it finds. On the other hand Linux masters this task beautifully, take the example of changing the IP address of a
network card. When yast (yet another setup tool) is finished changing the IP address it simply restarts the network services & the
computer runs with the updated IP. The same can be achieved when you manually want to restart any type of running service, this includes any
running server daemons. In the directory /sbin/init.d are all the services & server daemons files that you can start, stop or restart.
By simply typing /sbin/init.d/network restart will cause the network service to reboot. You will learn to love this, believe me :o)
