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Christopher Negus

"Linux Bible, 2008 Edition: Boot up to Ubuntu, Fedora, KNOPPIX, Debian, openSUSE, and 11 Other Distributions"


Configuring hardware is also on your duty list. When you add hardware to your Linux computer,
that hardware is often detected and configured automatically. In some cases, however, the hardware
may not have been set up properly, and you will use commands such as lsmod, modprobe, insmod,
and rmmod to configure the right modules to get the hardware working.
A device driveris the code permanently built into the kernel to allow application programs
to talk to a particular piece of hardware. A moduleis like a driver, but it is loaded
on demand. The section ???Configuring Hardware??? later in this chapter includes information about
using these commands to configure modules.
Managing file systems and disk space is your responsibility, too. You must keep track of the disk
space being consumed, especially if your Linux system is shared by multiple users. At some point,
you may need to add a hard disk or track down what is eating up your disk space (you use commands
such as find to do this).
Your duties also include monitoring system performance. You may have a runaway process on your
system, or you may just be experiencing slow performance. Tools that come with Linux can help
you determine how much of your CPU and memory is being consumed.
These tasks are explored in the rest of this chapter.


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