Eros is a hardware guru that happened to be the unknown guy sitting next to me on a plane.
He happens to be a happy Kubuntuer. While chatting, he told me one of his systems is an external hard drive made by copying a Kubuntu live CD image on it.
Why did you do so? I asked.
Because this way I can plug it in any computer, and it'll do hardware detection at boot. However it's a hard drive, so it's fast, and I can keep my home and all my customisations on it.
I had never thought of it.
That's an interesting and smart (ab)use of a live CD.
Now I wonder: what would be required to plug the live CD boot time hardware detection infrastructure on an existing Debian or Ubuntu instalation?
Update: slh on IRC suggests (a bit edited by me):
A lot of the former "obscure black magic" for live CDs isn't needed anymore. What is needed is: a kernel with static usb-storage, libusual, ehci-hcd, ohci-hcd, uhci-hdc (or an appropriate initrd/ initramfs). udev takes care of most h/w detection issues these days.
As long as everything needed to boot is contained in a single partition you don't need a fstab: udev, hal and pmount take care of the rest, procfs, sysvfs, devpts, usbfs, shm are mounted by sysvinit.
All what is left is a tool to create the xorg.conf while booting (those tools exist and just need to be called early).
Everything else is just a matter of convenience: enhancing the live span of the USB key by changing data into tmpfs, etc.; if passwordless logins are required then xsession and inittab need to be changed; new ssh host keys generated on boot; small stuff.
With ordinary flash storage, jffs2 and something to reduce write access is a good idea: perhaps unionfs for /var/ and /home/, bind mounting /tmp/ on /var/tmp/), but that's also not strictly necessary.
Mostly it boils down to running the xorg-creation script at every boot time.
There are various tools to do that. Some are here, but there is surely more. (Enrico's note: do we have anything in Debian that we can install and just does that?)
Since USB and PS/2 mice share the same device since kernel 2.6, that part of xorg.conf doesn't strictly need to be detected, same for the keyboard (alps and synaptic touchpads can be easily detected) and X.org can use the screen's ddc info although it's not always reliable.
It can boil down to just detecting the video chipset: something like this, that uses PCI IDs from discover1-data.
It can also become a lot easier with X.org's own ddc detection, which almost boils down to configuring input devices and selecting the video driver. If I understand Daniel Stone correctly, X.org will soon improve its detection routines (fail safe X (auto-)configuration) as well in X.org 7.3.
xresprobe is in debian: it's pretty similar to ddcxinfo-kanotix, both forked off RedHat's kudzu package - and all fail miserably on amd64. That's why ddcxinfo has a fallback to 1024*768 @75 Hz which "always works (+manual overrides)".