Now if some hardware device does not work I have to Google out what kernel options I should turn on to compile a kernel module for this hardware. I hope there is a better way to do it.
Somehow when I boot from live-cd my hardware magically works "of of the box". I guess live-cd contains lot's of modules for various hardware and the kernel somehow knows which module to load and use. Can I do something similar without using live-cd? Say I run lspci, find out all the available information about the hardware and using this information find out what module to compile?