[NCLUG] Disappearing Hardware?

[Rich Young]

My linux-at-home experiment is on the rocks lately.  What I've been
finding is that some devices will "just work" on the first boot after
they are installed, but then they don't work at all after booting again.
In one case (modem) the machine can't even find the hardware.  In
another (printer) it acts like it's working but I never get any print.  

Can anyone account for why I'd see this behavior?  I'm running Fedora
Core 3 (KRUD) on a 1.5GHz Athlon box

A more general question closely related: So that I can be more
self-sufficient, where does one look for the clues to problems like
this?  /var/log/messages seems to have some info, but when I can't get
online to google them (because the modem stopped working!), I'm kinda
helpless.


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I'm Rich Young, and I approved this message.