Bruce Tong wrote:
> I know zilch about PnP as you can probably tell. What does it take for
> Linux to work with that stuff?
Like a lot of other common Micro$oft usages, PnP is essentially meaningless.
All it really means is that the manufacturer has registered with M$ and
supplied them with a driver for the device, which M$ then bundles with their
OS. The card does have to meet certain specs I think, like being able to set
the IRQ and other settings from software, but there's nothing intrinsic to the
PnP designation that makes a device unusable by any OS.
I draw my admittedly hackneyed conclusion from the fact that Win95 PnP
'autodetection' just involves running through its list of drivers, loading
each one (or at least a fragment) and seeing which ones will talk to a given
card. The card itself doesn't usually do an ID on its own the way SCSI
devices do, for example.
That said, if you don't have a driver for a card and also can't set the IRQ
and such from jumpers (usually the case with PnP cards), you can have some
obvious troubles. How to get around them depends upon the card. We have
several PnP 3com cards, and our solution for configuring them is to boot from
a DOS floppy, run 3com's config utility, and then reboot back to real life.
The same trick is often necessary for 95 machines, but the 'boot DOS' part is
more obvious there.
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