A plug for the Plug-and-Play Howto

[Douglas Mayne]

I read the first half of the "Plug and Play Howto" and it provides the
information needed to resolve hardware resource conflicts.
Here is the canonical link:
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.html

One key piece of information that this document provides is to advise
users to use "Plug and Play" mode for ISA cards when available. Then,
when setting the BIOS for OS type, select non-plug-and-play for Linux.
This simply means that the motherboard initialization routines will
try to properly allocate resources (before OS boot begins).

This information helped me a lot, when I was having difficulty setting
up a Linux box, using a spare Micronics W6-Li motherboard. This
board's setup routine ("BIOS setup") does not have a screen where
resources can be reserved for use by non-pnp-isa cards. The
documentation for this motherboard should probably state the board
works only with ISA cards which can be configured plug-and-play. I
also had to "force" resource re-allocation to totally resolve the
system conflicts. After resetting, the OS booted with no conflicts,
and Kudzu could see my "new" devices. (Sweet!)

By the way, the board is working great as my first dual processor
system with a shiny, new kernel (2.4.20-pre10) which supports USB 2.0
(NEC chipset on a pci card). The performance is not bad (2-200MHz
cpu's, 256 MB RAM- makes for a very usable system.) I wouldn't put
these systems in the trash heap, yet. But, if you are throwing them
out, I'll take 'em ;-)

--Douglas Mayne