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Now that we've learned to install different pieces of hardware in openSUSE, of course we need to know how to troubleshoot hardware issues when they happen. Normally this doesn't happen. Normally hardware is configured very easily, either during installation or automatically when a new hardware device is introduced into the system. But things do happen. Hardware can cause problems. Uh, Linux is not perfect, just like other operating systems aren't, so you will have hardware issues occasionally. Now, these problems may involve hardware settings, uh, and resources such as RQ, ports and so forth, even device drivers. Most of this you're going to see, though, is not going to be with new hardware; it's likely going to be with older hardware. But in any case, there are ways to get around it and the ways, uh, to troubleshoot it. Some hardware issues may be that there's no native Linux support. Let's take an old example; Win modems, for example. These modems were specifically designed for use with Microsoft Windows and had software device driver issues, uh, in that they could not be ported over to Linux. Well, normally you would either have to buy another modem or more recently, more modems, uh, if they're even in use at all, support Linux. Uh, but there are also some other workarounds and as you'll see, there's other workarounds for other hardware as well. The example I gave you earlier in the course, wireless cards. There's good workarounds for them because they often give installation problems. There are not a lot of wireless, uh, card drivers out there for Linux. Some cards support Linux better than others. But you may have to use a workaround, such as an NDISWrapper method for those cards. That's essentially just taking a Windows driver and wrapping it using this tool and Linux would use the Windows driver for this tool. We'll talk more about wireless cards when we get into the networking, uh, part of the course. Now, if you're going to try to troubleshoot these hardware issues, there are several things we can do and I'll show you a little bit about those here in a moment. First thing you need to do is try to get information on what resources the hardware is using. There's different places you can find that. Um, if you're a Linux guru, you can look at the ETC Proc files, which are virtual file that the system creates, uh, upon boot and it tells you what resources the computer is currently using, what hardware resources each hardware device is using. Then we can get an idea if there are conflicts or not. You can also take the simple way and look at the hardware information module in YaST. We've already looked at this a couple of times and as you know, it gives you some really good information on hardware devices. Now, if you can't get any other information from those two sources, you might want to go on the web and start researching. First of all, look at the vendor site. See if it supports Linux natively. See if there are files that are required for the support. Um, see if there are some workarounds, some known trouble issues on the vendor site. Often times the vendor may give you information that may help you configure the device in Linux. You also may need to get the chip and configuration info off the hardware device itself. You may have to pull a card, such as a sound card, and get the particular chipset number off that card. This may cause you to have to go and download any installation or support files again from the vendor site or it may be from independent Linux sites. Sometimes Linux sites have hardware workarounds and information on how to install a particular device in Linux. Look on all the help and support pages you can find, both vendor and non-vendor. Um, you can also read blogs of what others have done. Likely, if you have a piece of hardware, you're not the first person to have issues with that hardware in Linux, so look at some of the posts and blogs of others who have had this same hardware problem and see how they fixed it. Usually if enough people have issues with a particular piece of hardware, that may cause the vendor to introduce a fix. But if not, some of the more experienced Linux users may post how they fixed that particular hardware problem. Again, you could look on Linux support and help pages and there are hundreds and hundreds of them out there and you just basically have to do a search on your favorite search engine, such as Google, for example, and look up the particular, um, support issues with this device. You could also try emailing the vendor support site and asking them, if they don't have any information already on their support site. This may cause them to do some research and get back to you. Let's take a quick look, uh, for example, about how to look at configuration information, uh, using the logs that Linux provides. So you might determine if there's hardware issues on startup and so forth. We're back in our KDE session. We haven't looked at this particular tab in YaST yet and it's the miscellaneous tab and there's a couple of things here that actually, uh, definitely relate to hardware issues. One icon here that you need to be aware of, especially if you're installing hardware that is not natively supported by Linux, and that's the vendor driver CD. If you click on that, it's going to tell you, if you've inserted the CD, of course, that, uh, that there are hardware drivers available for that piece of hardware. If you have issues with hardware and you are trying to troubleshoot your problem, there are a couple of things you can look up. First of all, look at the startup log. Now, the startup log is going to tell you everything that happened when the system started up, everything that was loaded and so forth. Now, this can be a little bit daunting to look through and you may have to get someone who is, uh, more, uh, conversant in Linux that you are if you're a newbie to go through here and kind of tell you what happened when, what modules were loaded, which kernel drivers were loaded and so forth and you actually may can see if there were issues with any hardware devices that were loaded and that would give you a good troubleshooting start so you can pinpoint what the problem is. Your log is going to be different for your computer, but this is just an example of what you're going to see. Another place you can look at is the system log itself and these are, this is a log that basically tells you a lot of the same information the startup log will give you, but it will also tell you current information, device loads and so forth and if a device has been accessed and if there are problems with it. Um, so this is like a running log and you may have to search this and, and know, uh, know what's going on with it. You may have to get again a Linux, uh, expert to help you with this so you can kind of see what changes are happening in your system that may be caused by faulty hardware or hardware that isn't detected correctly. This log could give you a good starting point for troubleshooting. Using the techniques we've mentioned earlier and looking at the logs are just a few of the ways that you're going to be able to troubleshoot hardware installation issues. Again, not every single piece of hardware in the world is supported by Linux, let alone openSUSE and some pieces of hardware simply won't work. But most modern hardware should work fairly well, with a little bit tweaking. But hopefully we've give you some starting points where you can start troubleshooting if they don't work.