Installing Sound, Network, and Other Cards

To install a new card, your kernel must first be configured to support it. Support for most cards is provided in the form of modules that can be dynamically loaded into the kernel. Installing support for a card is usually a simple matter of loading a module that includes the drivers for it. For example, drivers for the Sound Blaster sound card are in the module sb.o. Loading this module makes your sound card accessible to Linux. Most distributions automatically detect the cards installed on your system and load the needed modules. If you change sound cards, the new card is automatically detected by Kudzu, invoking redhat-config-soundcard to configure it. For network cards, Kudzu invokes redhat-config- network to perform the configuration. You could also load modules you need manually, removing an older conflicting one. The section "Modules" later in this chapter describes this process.

Device files for most cards are already set up for you in the /dev directory. For example, the device name for your sound card is /dev/audio. The device names for network cards are aliases for network modules instead of device files. For example, the device name for your Ethernet card begins with eth, with the numbering starting from 0, as in eth0 for the first Ethernet card on your system. An alias used to reference the module used for that particular card, for example, a 3Com Etherlink XL card, aliases the 3c59x network module, whose alias would be eth0 if it is the first Ethernet card. The modules themselves are kept in the kernel's module directory, /lib/modules, as described in the last section.