How do I add Vendor and Device ID's to the kernel on boot

[David Cooper]

Hello,

 I just recently got a nice Dell Inspiron 1420 and I'm loading RHEL5
Client (workstation), I knew it wouldn't work straight out of the box,
but I wanted to get it running by hand for the experience of compiling
drivers etc.

 I've dug around (and learned a lot) but I'm now at the point that I
have the new (unknown device/vendor ID's) which should be using my
newly compiled tg3 drivers in /lib/modules.....

I've tried using insmod and modprobe etc.

I don't know how to tell the system to use them upon boot. It's a
broadcom nic vendor 0x14e4 device 0x1713.  Is there a way to insert
this info in grub (as an "append" command to the initrd) and tell it
to load the needed driver when it see's that string? Am I heading in
the right direction?

Thank you for any help.

PS. I know I could just go with Fedora (or even load the new 8 when it
comes out) but then I wouldn't learn how to do this. :)