Is linux a plug and play OS?

[Scott Becker]

Several times I've had difficultys bringing up eth0 after an OS install 
and found that setting "Plug and play OS" to "no" in the bios setup 
would cause Kudzu to find the nic and everything worked. This helped 
with 3 diffenent nics, including a 3c905c with rh9 and a sound card.

Is far as I can tell the bios was assigning an IRQ and/or IO address 
after I made the change so that the device was ready for linux (kudzu) 
to use. Does linux normally handle this or does the bios need to set 
this way normally?
    Scott Becker