[GRLUG] Meeting agenda?

[Tim Schmidt]

On 10/19/06, Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sure thing.  When you're playing around with new kinds of hardware for
> the first time, finding the right device driver is often a real PITA.
>
> A few things to keep in mind:
> * Video cards are under the "Character devices"

Eh...  for PCs, which is what we're talking about here, all video
cards are supported by a kernel without any special drivers being
enabled under 'character devices'.  The kernel simply doesn't care
about anything other than throwing text at something that looks
remotely VGA-compliant.

Now, if you want fancy graphics on your normally text-based terminal,
or way more than an 80 character wide screen, you get to play around
with these drivers.

> * hard drives and CD-ROM drives are under the "block devices"
> * Most (but not all) USB devices are in the USB category.
> * To use USB disk drives, you need to enable SCSI support. (Which I
> believe is under "block devices", but I'd have to check.)

All pretty good...  don't forget that options enabled or disabled
early in the config process can affect (and even determine the
existence of) options in other places.  Sometimes there's just no
substitute to grepping for your desired feature, and ripping open it's
associated kconfig file to see what other options it depends upon.

--tim