Why is hardware so vexing?
Basically, there is a lot of hardware and each requires a driver. People keep making new pieces and types of hardware and people keep buying it. All this means keeping up to date is a constant struggle, although projects like the Linux Driver Project are helping change that. So I have a shiny new piece of hardware, how do I make it work? For the most part, hardware auto-detection has just worked for many Ubuntu releases. In fact, Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) was the first major distro to ship with the so-called Utopia stack, which allowed autodetection of many pieces of hardware via HAL. However there have been a few types of commonly used hardware causing problems on linux desktops: printers, video cards, winmodems (also called software modems) and wireless cards. So what is this about printers? With Ubuntu 7.10, the addition of system-config-printer has meant that the kind of auto-detection common with USB sticks and other similar kinds of hardware now comes to printers. Just plug in
