Hardware Configuration Tools for Linux?

Uttles asks: "I recently installed Mandrake 8.1 on my machine at home and as a Linux Newbie I have been having trouble getting all of my hardware to perform correctly. The Mandrake distribution comes with a config tool called HardDrake but I have not found it very useful. It displays every piece of hardware, but it doesn't give you the option to install or configure drivers for that hardware. In fact, the only functionality it has is a "run config tool" button that for some devices launches a configuration application. I have been told that Red Hat and other distributions have similar tools, and none are very powerful. So now I am asking Slashdot: What is the best hardware configuration tool, either GUI or text based, for Linux systems?"

Kudzu

[nomis80]

Although nothing beats doing it by hand, I've had most success with RedHat's kudzu. It is run by default when you boot (it prints "Detecting new hardware...") and if it detects new hardware, you'll get prompted for the configuration. USB, video cards, hard drives, everything gets detected. Once, I changed a video card for another identical one. Kudzu told me that he hadn't been fooled, and asked me if I wanted to change the configuration. Mandrake's tool is based on RedHat's kudzu, and should act pretty much the same.

Even though detection is top-notch, configuration still isn't. Video cards, sound cards, hard drives, mouse & keyboard, network interfaces and other such common peripherals are handled fine, but if you want to do more than that, you'll have to fire up a text editor.

One thing you'll enjoy though: once the configuration is done, you'll never have to fiddle with it until you change hardware.

The best configuration tool...

[rocjoe]

...Is your head.

Hand-editing

[LinuxGeek8]

For the most drivers you can edit /etc/modules.conf and put in an alias like:
alias eth0 tulip
If your networkcard uses a tulip module.
This only counts for kernel-level configuration.
Setting up most of the things (like network) can be done through /etc/sysconfig.
Some hardware still needs some configuration afterwards. For printers you can use printerdrake or kups or the webbased interface of cups.
For scanners there's nothing yet, but in mdk 8.2 there will be a tool scannerdrake, which should set up /etc/sane.d for a supported scanner.

Imo the text based solutions are there when the install of the distro failed at a particular device, or if kudzu fails. Or if you just want to check it out.

Use tha configuration files, not tha gui!!!

[PaqC]

Nooooo!!! If you want to do it right, do it the hard way, just change the configuration files and don't use the graphical tools. That's the good side of linux: you have total control of your own system... think about it!

dmesg ...

[josepha48]

I am working on a program at this time that displays info in the /proc directory. Eventually it will allow you to set some of this stuff up, but for now it just displays it.

To configure X I'd use XF86Setup, or XF86Config or Redhats Xconfigurator. It is actually pretty good in detecting most video cards, RAM etc.

For Network and other things redhat has some tools to do that. They have modem tool and in RH7.1 they introduced an internet configg tool, I think it is wvdial. They have soundconf for sound, netconf for network, mouseconf for the mouse. I am not sure if they have anything else, but these have worked for me. I also look hard and careful at what hardware is supported by the Linux kernel.