Understanding hardware support

[Tom and Esther Ward]

Hi.
Part of the problem is that different Linux distributions, (brands,) have
different ways of handling the kernel modules, (drivers,) for handling
hardware. Some such as Mandrake use pnp style applications like harddrake to
manage all your hardware. Others allow you to edit modules.conf directly and
you are in charge of telling Linux which module needs to be loaded.
However, there is some common ground here which I will explain.
At the heart of every Linux is the kernel. This kernel can load drivers,
(called modules,) which support a wide range of hardware. There are
utilities such as modprobe, rmmod, and insmod which allow you to manually
load and remove modules from a running Linux system. Every Linux system has
a text file which tells which modules to load on startup. In Mandrake the
file is /etc/modules.conf. I am not sure what the current zipslack modules
load file is.
First, of all you might compare the documentations version of the kernel
with the one you have installed. After all, what was true when the doc was
written is not necessarily what has to be done on a current Linux system.
Things change rapidly in Linux, and often the docs take a while to catch up
to current.
Sometimes a module is not present in the stock kernel source from
kernel.org. In those cases you have to get the kernel source, patch the
source code with your driver, and reconfigure, and compile it from scratch.
For speakup it is one of those patches you will require in order to get
speakup support for Linux.