You should be able to get basic functionality in GNU/Linux from any printer that supports the PostScript printing language, thanks to Hewlett-Packard’s free drivers. If a card is listed and the Notes column has no comments about the state of support, then you can be confident that the card will work in modern distributions. The matrix gives detailed information about each driver for developers, but, so far as consumers are concerned, what matters most is whether a particular card is listed. The matrix is no longer maintained as of May 5, 2007, but its port to a wiki is still incomplete as I write, so, for the time being, you should use the old page. You may also be able to winnow out useful information from the mailing lists of Linux Audio Developers.Īnother useful source for sound information is the Soundcard Matrix of the Advanced Linux and Sound Architecture project, whose work provides sound support for modern distributions. For a succinct summary of GNU/Linux-compatible sound cards, you can go to the Linux Sound site. No single site contains complete information for the concerned consumer buying sound cards. Whichever drivers are available in your distribution’s native package format and repositories will be the easiest for you to manage. Fedora 7 is one of the first to ship with the free Nouveau drivers for Nvidia cards. Commercial distributions like Linspire and Xandros often ship the proprietary drivers, while Ubuntu uses the free drivers by default but includes a Restricted Drivers Manager from which you can easily install proprietary ones, and Debian offers proprietary drivers in the non-free sections of its repositories. In other words, none are completely satisfactory.Īnother consideration is your distribution’s policy about which drivers it ships. Broadly speaking, free drivers for ATI and Nvidia tend to lack 3-D support, while the proprietary drivers of ATI tend to be slow and buggy and those for Nvidia fast but variable in quality. However, just as likely, your choice will involve a tradeoff of functionality. If you have a choice between free and proprietary drivers, your choice may be based purely on your philosophical preferences. The Avivo project is also developing free drivers for the R500/R600 lines of ATI cards, but, so far, none have been released. You can also check the Nouveau project, which is developing free drivers for Nvidia. Most people will be concerned with the proprietary drivers for Nvidia and ATI, the two leading video card manufacturers. For proprietary drivers, check the manufacturers’ sites. For free drivers, check the X.org site’s list of supported cards. If you want to know whether a video card is supported, you have two main guides. The information varies from the vague to the exhaustive, but, in all cases, represents the most succinct and complete resources of which I am aware. What follows is an effort to list the sites with the most current information available about cards and peripherals. Your results will inevitably include dozens of pages, many outdated or incomplete, all of which makes sorting and assessing the information a time-consuming, often confusing task full of jargon that only experts can fully understand. Since few manufacturers mention GNU/Linux support on their packaging, let alone their Web sites, your only recourse is to search the Internet for information. Of course, if you think for a moment, you probably want to avoid such hardware anyway - a software-driven DVD drive, for example, is going to require a couple of extra reboots if you ever want to start your system from it.Įven when you can take so much support for granted, many pieces of hardware remain a gamble. However, you should be wary of hardware that is operated by software rather than buttons, because the software is likely designed for Windows, or sometimes Mac OS X. Almost all motherboards, hard drives, keyboards, mice, network cards, DVD drives, and flash drives should work with GNU/Linux without any trouble. These days, too, you can take support for many types of hardware for granted. Yet enough gaps in support remain that doing research before buying remains a sensible idea. Today you can pick out any computer system and stand a strong chance of having it work out of the box with your distribution of choice. True, hardware support for GNU/Linux has improved greatly in the last decade.
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