Changing drives

[Maynard Kuona]

I came across one of the ugly faces of Linux recently when I changed
around some drives. I had gotten rid of one of my hard drives, and then,
I had to change one of my optical drives to become a master. I chose to
change the cd writer.

All was well until it got to the part where I needed to burn something.
But the drive was not appearing in any of the places for the Nautilus cd
burner. I was stumped for a while, trying to figure this ine out. It
took me the better part of an afternoon to actually figure out that I
had to change the extra parameter I was passing to the kernel at boot in
Grub, to enable scsi emulation for the drive.

Linux will never be easy enough for the masses if stuff like this still
has to be configured. The problem would have been in two parts here.
Even if the burner had been autodetected nciley, and Grub reconfigured
automatically, it would have required a reboot, because hardware
detection takes place after these parameters have been passed to the
kernel. Or maybe new drivers are needed for us to not have to use scsi
emulation. Any thought on this please. I found it frustrating though.