vdr plug'n and play

When the power supply of our VDR failed 2 months ago that proved to be
the right oppurtunity to inject some hardware upgrades into our VDR
box. So I decided to add a second DVB-S card and a third harddisk
(SATA 250G). Having done a couple of vdr upgrades in the last 6 years
I expected some minor hassles to get it back into working state. But,
oh joy, none of these. Second DVB-S card: plugged it in, booted vdr
box, kernel detected it alright, vdr detected it, tried multiple
concurrent recordings, perfect. Ok, I've got to admit that I run a
relatively recent 2.6.12 kernel and Debian unstable which includes a recent
vdr version, but still. On to the SATA disk, this is a fairly old
mainboard so I added a cheapo SATA controller and recompiled the
kernel because my custom compiled kernel didn't include SATA
support. Plugged in the card, rebooted, kernel detected SATA disk,
created ext3, mounted filesystem and voila: done. Everything works
pretty smoothly since then. And I've got a family of very demanding
vdr users which provides first level support experiences along the
lines of: "Daddy, it doesn't work, please fix it _now_, I _need_ to
watch my daily SpongeBob.".
In the 12 years of using GNU/Linux we're finally getting really close
to plug'n play: not graphics-whiz-bang-wise but functionally-wise for sure ;-)