I was playing around with my laptop last night and decided to see if I
could get some rudimentary hotplug capability to work with my IDE DVD-ROM
drive.  I found a small program at

  http://turingmachine.org/hardware/helium/

that seemed to do the trick.  It scans the IDE bus at IO address 0x170
(ide1), and I was happy to see that it worked on my system (the system
appeared to freeze for a moment, but it correctly detected the drive).

I'm curious if anyone knows of a `nicer' way to do this.  I've heard that
ACPI (a successor of sorts to APM) should allow for this, but from what
I've heard, ACPI is fairly unsupported in Linux these days..  It'd be cool
if it was automatic

Also, does anyone know of a similar trick for scanning for a floppy drive?
 I don't use the floppy in my laptop very often (usually just for updating
the BIOS), but it'd be nice to just plug it in and have it work..

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   I'm a firm believer in the
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   idea of a ruling class,
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)  since I rule.
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20020302/4627f4e4/attachment.pgp