README for the KDE System Control Tool v.0.1.x
September 19th, 1999


1 WHAT IS IT?
---------------

The KDE System Control Tool is an attempt to build a hardware configuration
tool for the K Desktop Environment (KDE) very similar to the system properties
dialog of Win'9x.
The author thinks that current hardware information sources look cryptic and
are spread over the whole system, making it a pain in the a* to keep the
survey.


2 DOES IT WORK ALREADY?
-----------------------

Depends on what you call working :-) In fact, it's able to detect most
hardware on your system but you can't change resource settings yet.
Effort is concentrated on ISA PnP at this stage of development as
the ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) team has written some
kernel code to offer native ISA PnP support which already found it's
way into the 2.3.x kernel. The great advantage of this kind of ISA PnP 
support over the traditional method (isapnptools) is, that you are able 
to configure resources on the fly by simply writing to /proc/isapnp.
I did not find something similar for PCI yet, so PCI is strictly read-
only for now (any suggestions welcome!).
However, I think both methods have to be combined, that is the KDE System
Control Tool should allow configuration on the fly to make testing
easy but should also write an isapnp.conf in order to save the settings.

If you run a 2.2.x kernel, get the isapnp module sources from
the ALSA home site,

	http://www.alsa-project.org

it's located in alsa-drivers/support. As mentioned above, 2.3.x
kernels may already contain the ISA PnP support from the ALSA project,
at least my 2.3.18 does :-)	

3 HOW TO USE IT?
----------------

Usage is straightforward, I think, unless you never ran Windows on your
machine which I find hard to believe...
However, things are (as always) slightly different on Linux: As a simple
user you won't be able to do anything that may affect stability of your
system and changing resource settings might obviously do that.
If, on the other hand, started by root the KDE System Control Tool will
allow for some actions that might affect system stability such as SCSI
device rescan (turn your SCSI scanner on, click 'Refresh' in the device
manager and see how it's detected and can be used thereafter :).

4 I WANT TO PARTICIPATE!
------------------------

Great, drop me a mail (twesthei@physik.uni-bielefeld.de) and we'll see
on how you might serve the project ;-)
For example, I don't feel motivated enough to start documentation, exchange
MS pixmaps, etc.


Please send any suggestions to <twesthei@physik.uni-bielefeld.de> 
(Thorsten Westheider) and flames of any kind to /dev/null.
