Re: Aunt Tillie builds a kernel (was Re: ISA hardware discovery -- the elegant solution)

David Woodhouse
2002-01-15T11:40:48Z

esr@thyrsus.com said:
> He hard-compiled in that driver. lsmod(1) can't see it.

man dmesg.

Others have asserted that this kind of autoconfigure facility for
non-technical people isn't necessary.

I assert that it is actually harmful, and will make their life more
difficult.

My father's computer runs Linux. He doesn't need to recompile his kernels
or do any maintenance - I don't even trust him to run up2date for himself.
It's all he can manage to dial up and look at a web page so I can grab his
current IP address out of my logs, log in and do the rest.

If I get a bug report from him, it's not particularly coherent or useful.
Yet because he has a kernel binary which is identical to the one used by
many other more technical users out there, I can often match what he
complains about with the more useful bugreports in Bugzilla.

If he (or even I) compiled a custom kernel for him rather than using the
distro one, I wouldn't have a whelk's chance in a supernova of working out
WTF he was on about.

--
dwmw2