The Linux Plug-and-Play HOWTO: Introduction

1. Introduction

1.1 Copyright, Trademarks, Disclaimer, & Credits

Copyright

I. For the case of minor changes and corrections where there exists a current maintainer:
Send your proposed changes to the current maintainer first. You may distribute (per II. below) only if the current maintainer neglects to incorporate your changes in a timely manner. If the changes are only to correct typos, you need not wait for a reply from the maintainer before you distribute.

II. In all other cases:

Make a good faith effort to insure that a copy of the derivative work (including any master copy) gets on the Internet at a well-known (and mirrored) site for free downloading.
If you change the license, license the work in the spirit of this license, or use GPL (Free Software Foundation).
The major authors become the copyright owners (not to exceed 2). Minor contributions do not make you an author.
Make a good faith effort to contact the maintainer (or copyright owners if there is no maintainer) to let them know what you have done. If the changes are extensive, then you should also attempt to make more such contacts (including prior to your project).
Give full credit to significant previous authors and contributors although the credits section need not exceed 1% of the length of the document.

Trademarks

If certain words are trademarks, the context should make it clear to whom they belong. For example "MS Windows" (or just "Windows") implies that "Windows" belongs to Microsoft (Micro$oft).

Disclaimer

Much of the info in this HOWTO was obtained from Serial-HOWTO, the Internet, sales clerks, etc. and may be unreliable. While I haven't intentionally tried to mislead you, there are likely a number of errors in this document. Please let me know about them. Since this is free documentation, it should be obvious that neither I nor previous authors can be held legally responsible for any errors.

1.2 Future Plans: You Can Help

Please let me know of any errors in facts, opinions, logic, spelling, grammar, clarity, links, etc. But first, if the date is over a months old, check to see that you have the latest version. Please send me any info that you think belongs in this document.

For this first version, 0.00, I haven't even looked over the book: PnP System Architecture and don't fully understand PnP. Also, I haven't yet compared the 2 competing patches to make Linux a PnP OS. Nor have I fully explained how PnP is configured by the BIOS (let alone how the patched Linux OS does it). Thus this HOWTO is incomplete and may be inaccurate (let me know where I'm wrong). In this HOWTO I've used ?? to indicate that I don't really know the answer. Would you like to improve on (rewrite) and maintain this HOWTO? I'm looking for someone to turn it over to.

1.3 New Versions of this HOWTO

New versions of the Plug-and-Play-HOWTO will be available to browse and/or download at LDP mirror sites. For a list of such sites see: http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/mirrors.html. When you get to a a nearby mirror site, click on "Linux Documentation Project" (LDP) and then search for the 2nd occurrence of "HOWTO". Various formats are available. If you only want to quickly check the date of the latest version you may not need to use a mirror site so look at: http://sunsite.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Plug-and-Play-HOWTO.html.