Linux Mandrake professionals, Please help !!
I want to find out information in your "own words" if possible on how the device management works on Mandrake linux.... I would like to know like the architectue of and stuff...just make it simple if you can, just the basic of it...any help will be appreciate it

Mandrake is pretty good with hotplugging devices. Running dmesg and checking out logs will tell you what it has identified. Once identified, you just need to edit fstab (if it's a drive or something) or cups (if it's a printer). If everything is "plugged in" during installation, mandrake is really good about automagically setting stuff up.

what is dmesg, fstab, cups? By hotpluggin you mean plug and play? Thanks

No, like USB, Hotplug PCI and Firewire.
fstab is a table of your filesystems, mount points and mount options. See for yourself in /etc/fstab
dmesg just prints out the kernel messages, not all the stuff from the init scripts, just the kernel. This includes detected hardware, SMP information, RAID info etc. CUPS is the Common Unix Print System. Check out www.cups.org Its basically an API for printing and network printing. It also allows you to use drivers from GS and stuff.
the /dev/ system is laid out much like on other devfs distros and can be configured though /etc/devfsd.conf
Maybe be a bit more specific in your question.

Okay, sorry I wasn't more specific. I'm going to set up a scenario so you can see what these things do to try and make it as simple as possible. Let's say that you've installed mandrake 9.1. After you have installed it, let's say that you buy a digital camera with a usb port (it's memory card is a flash card). I think the default kernel has usb support enabled. Plug the camera into a usb port. Open a bash prompt (or konsole or eterm or whatever you do to get to the command line). Type

su
(root's password)

then type
dmesg

dmesg tells you what is plugged in and where it's at. I might get ripped for such a generalization, but that's it's most simple function I think. You will see things such as cpu information, hdc, hdd, fd0, (cdrom drives and floppy drives). Read carefully and you will see something like
"mass storage device on sda."
This tells you that the computer sees the memory card on your camera on sda. (Do a google search or search these forums for an explanation on hda, sda, etc...). So dmesg gives you system information.

fstab is a file, it's address (or location) is /etc/fstab. This is where you can define mount points. In order tor ead a floppy, you need to mount it. The line in fstab will look something like this

/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto, users, rw 0 0

The first entry (/dev/fd0) is where the device is found. /mnt/floppy/ is where the mount point is, or where you can find the information on the floppy. Auto means that linux will automatically look for the filesystem (ext2,ext3, resierfs, fat, vfat, etc). No auto means that it won't automatically be mounted at boot time. Users mean that more than just root can mount and unmount a device, and rw means read write. I have no idea what the 0 0 is but it's there. So when you stick a floppy in the drive, you type
mount /mnt/floppy
or
mount /dev/fd0

Back to the illustration with the digitial camera. Open up fstab with root privelages (so that you can edit it). This line needs to be added so that you can mount the camera (or the memory card in the camera).

/dev/sda /mnt/camera vfat noauto, users, rw 0 0

Now, as root, you need to make sure that the directory /mnt/camera exists.

su
password
mkdir /mnt/camera

Now, you can type
mount /mnt/camera

and if everything is set up right, the camera will be mounted and you can access whatever is on it.

Cups is a printer server--I think it's mandrakes default. Anyways, you use dmesg to make sure your computer identifies the fact that a printer is plugged in.

Hot plug means plug it in and the computer knows it's there. It's not necessarily "plug and play" because you might need to edit some config files to get it to work.

Hope this helps.