Where oh where can my drivers be

[JeffPr]

I just installed linux on my hewlett-packert machine and I have no drivers for anything like the video card, sound card etc. because they all came built into my version of windows XP. And they won't do me any good in linux anyway, so can somebody tell me some good sites to start looking for drivers for my hardware so I can install everything properly.

regards

Do you think your friend could feed my cat? Heisenberg wasn't sure. ~ Erwin Schrodinger talking of his revolutionary paradox

 

[mattjurado]

Problem with HPs, they tend to make their hardware specific for Microsoft OS. I've actually seen HP computers preloaded with XP Home Edition not be upgradeable to XP Pro! I thought that was amazing, I mean, its really the same os, just with Pro you get a few more features. What distro did you install? Do you know what hardware you have?

Matt J.

 

[enorbet]

Jeff
You definitely need to know what hardware you have to ever get Linux to run the way you want. Many soundcards and videocards are supportable right in the kernel if you can't find modules/drivers. nVidia cards are very well supported in Linux by nVidia themselves and in fact many people report the drivers are superior to nVidia's doze drivers ( guess they have something decent to work with ). If you HP has onboard sound while it is fairly likely that you can even get it working in Linux, you'd be amazed how much CPU resources usually get chewed up and wasted by these cheapies. It is most often best to get a real sound card and disable onboard. Hopefully your video isn't onboard and you actually have an AGP slot in which case your present card may have a decent driver ( even ATI is working on decent linux support ) but if not there's always nVidia. Before anyone can help you much more you and we need to know what you've got.... brand and model.
Jimmy

 

[JeffPr]

Well, I understand what you are saying. The good thing is that linux is detecting my network card ok because I can get on the internet. I have sound because it asked me if I wanted to do a sound check and sound came from my speakers, however, your point about sound cards is noted. My main problem is trying to configure my lexmark USB printer to work with linux, I have a CD that came with the printer that contains the driver but haven't tried to get it work. As for a graphics card, the one that came with my computer is the intel integrated extreme graphics with 64 Mb of memory. I am not sure about the USB stuff, like the USB controllers and all the system devices, there are alot of things listed under there in windows XP. I hope that I don't need a driver for each device separately. Let me know what you think.

regards,

Do you think your friend could feed my cat? Heisenberg wasn't sure. ~ Erwin Schrodinger talking of his revolutionary paradox