Member Avatar for RikTelner

Virtual situation.

I am about to take my nasty hands to buy seperate hardware and build computer.
The computer will be ready, I will run image on CD and install Linux on SDD/HDD (storage).
How do I provide drivers to it? I think I have to download them from website pointing out which product of theirs did I bought and on which operation system I want to install. I probably get an ununsual file to download. How do I mount it on disc so Linux can reach and install them so I can at least try to avoid problems in future without strange codecs and drivers problems.

I think I need video card, wireless & audio card drivers, right? Did I forgot something?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by khakilang
Member Avatar for rubberman

Most of the time, when you install Linux, it already has the drivers you need for your hardware, including video. Linux is NOT Windows! It will interrogate the system on boot and enable the needed drivers at that time. Sometimes you can get better performance with proprietary drivers (nVidia video cards are a good example of that), but don't bother until you really need them.

So,

  1. Don't just download and install drivers until you really need them.
  2. You don't need to mount a driver on disc. Either the package manager will do that for you, or when it is built from source it can be installed directly onto the system disc. Linux has standard ways to do that.

I have installed Linux in various forms on many systems. Usually, I don't need to deal with hardware drivers at all. This includes servers and laptops.

Member Avatar for mike_2000_17

As rubberman says, in Linux, drivers are implemented as kernel modules. Most drivers are open-source. Basically, the developement community didn't wait for hardware manufacturers to create Linux drivers for their hardware, because they could very well have waited forever, and instead, they developed open-source drivers. For the most part, these drivers are written by reverse-engineering the Windows drivers, and making "lowest common denominators" drivers (manufacturers usually re-use the same basic set of commands between models, so, a "basic" driver will work for a whole series of products).

So, this means that most drivers in Linux are open-source and can therefore be packaged with the Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, RHEL, etc.) installation and package-repository. This means that as you install Linux (most popular distributions anyways), it will automatically check your hardware, automatically download / install / enable all the appropriate drivers, and you will probably not have to do anything after that. It is possible that a few peripheral things are not working (e.g., wireless, microphone, webcam, etc.) or not working as well as they could (e.g., graphics card, etc.). If that's the case, you can check if there are proprietary drivers for those specific things (and installing them is easy, and there are usually simple instructions). If there are any issues after that, well, you know where to ask for help ;)

commented: Thank you. I sure know where to ask help :). +2
Member Avatar for khakilang

I am using Kubuntu and have no issue with any hardware because it come with "Additional Driver" software that it can search for propreity hardware and install the driver.

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