I've got Ubuntu 7.04 and the system has a ISA Soundblaster card which is not automatically found.

I came across a fix involving mod-probe snd-sbawe plus a few similar commands which seems to solve the problem nicely.

Can anyone tell me the best place to put these so that they are automatically executed when the system is started up?

I have discounted /etc/profile and $home/.login etc as they would be executed for each user.

I'm guessing its somewhere in the init.d directory but I don't want to mess up the mysterious inner workings of Ubuntu any more than necessary.

So, how to add custom commands to boot process:
1. Write a script that can be run as root and does all the necessary work.
2. Think of a good name for it and put it (not forgetting to switch executable bit on) to /etc/init.d
3. Go to /etc/rc.d/rcS.d (or /etc/rcS.d - as it seems to be in Ubuntu; distributions have different viewpoints on this question). Look at all S* symlinks. They all link to some scripts that are executed in the order these links go alphabetically. Pick a number to put after S so that your script will run early not too early - it may have some dependencies, by the way.
4. Create a link S<number><name> to /etc/init.d/<name> .

Thanks for a very clear explanation. Things have changed a bit since I last touched Unix.

I've added a script and it works fine now