Date: Fri, 20 Dec 2002 17:13:53 +1100
From: Stuart Young sgy@amc.com.au
Subject: Re: Debian X problem
To: LUV luv@luv.asn.au

At 12:55 PM 20/12/02 +1100, Barry Kirsten wrote:

> And how do I cause the above modules to load on boot in Debian? (vi
> /etc/modules.conf, the way I used to do it in Mdk, doesn't seem to be
> appropriate in Debian.)

Add the modules (in the order you want them to load) into /etc/modules - NO
..conf on that file. Options to be passed to the modules should be detailed
in /etc/modules.conf as per normal.

On Debian, modules.conf (and chandev.conf if necessary) is/are
automatically generated from the contents of the /etc/modutils/ directory,
which contains a group of files that are (basically) concatenated together
to form /etc/modules.conf, by 'update-modules' when it is run. There are
some basic rules placed on what gets used out of /etc/modutils/ though. Of
note is that *.dpkg-* and *~ files are excluded (package new/old files and
backup files), and an 'arch/' directory exists which contains architecture
specific stuff (which only gets added for the architecture you are running).

If you wish to add stuff to modules.conf, I'd recommend creating a new
file, and naming it local.* (of course you would want to replace * with
something relevant) so that it's extremely unlikely to ever get written
over by an installed package.

Note: local.* seems to be a quite common thing now to use for (and in)
config files for local packages and/or local modifications. eg: local
packages added to the 'menu' subsystem should use 'local.*' to identify
that the package is a local package (as per the documentation contained in
/usr/share/doc/menu/html/ - Chapter 5 in particular).

Good luck!

Stuart Young - sgy@amc.com.au
(aka Cefiar) - cefiar1@optushome.com.au