Book Excerpt  Know the hardware in your computer: task 2.2  Task
2.2: Learn about Your Hardware  The x86 PC architecture, and
therefore the x86-64 architecture derived from it, has evolved
Requires Free Membership to View  over a period of more than two
decades. For this reason, many parts of the design of these
systems are limiting or strange—what seemed a good solution to a
problem in the 1980s might be inadequate today. Furthermore, old
methods of manually configuring hardware must continue to be
supported today, or they may have left behind vestiges of
themselves in today's hardware and software.  One consequence of
these facts is that configuring PC hardware can be difficult.
Adding a new card or other device can sometimes break a working
computer, and the many different types of hardware can lead to
confusion. This task examines how you can learn about your
hardware from within Linux in order to avoid problems when
adding new hardware. The next task expands on this topic and
looks at troubleshootin