Recent Security vulnerability in Skype

John wrote:

> What about the hardware the installer doesn't see? Examples
> USB DSL modems (I recall an alcatel "stingray" works but you have to
> load its firmeare)
> PC cards one might plug into a laptop
> PCI cards one might plug into a desktop (or server) machine?. Most of
> _my_ PCI cards are later purchases
> USB devices (other than that DSL modem)
> Firewire devices
> Printers

How is this any different than for Windows users?  They routinely have to
install the software that comes with the device.  Our users can take their
existing machine and download from the package sources.  It might be nice
to have a pretty "Add New Hardware" gui...

>> If you _do_ want to use the old drive in a new machine, it's not rocket
>> science to install the required packages beforehand.  In any case, the
>> user should have the choice to not install restricted software.
> 
> I'd probably beyond the non-technical user. Think the people who think
> Windows and OS X the absolute limit.

Then we need that "new hardware" gui. 
> 
> If, OTOH, you want a system that "just works," then when you come to
> upgrade to a new system or just add bits, you really dom't want to waste
> time and money hunting up drivers or mucking round copying disk drives.

I don't want to waste my disk space on all the tons of software I'll never
use.  I could buy a Mac if I wanted to do that...
> 
> I'm still coming to terms with SuSE, but it seems there that if you want
> to configure some hardware that requires a driver, then it notices that
> and installs it.
> 
> I'm not entirely convinced with SuSE, but it certainly has _some_ things
> to teach Ubuntu fans.

Ubuntu (and Debian) _can_ do that - it's present in the base installer.  I'm
not sure why there's no obvious way to do it later.
-- 
derek