General question about drivers for Linux

[Relztrah]

I was refurbishing an old Dell OptiPlex GX110 for a friend and noticed in the downloads for this model on the Dell website that they ask for the OS and one of the options is Red Hat Linux. Would these drivers work with other distros? I'm not planning on installing Red Hat or any Linux on this machine, but I was just curious. I've noticed that there are also Linux drivers available for HP printers on the HP website. Are these drivers universal for all distros?

[Paul Komski]

Installing drivers in Linux is little different from installing any "packages". There are often workarounds from distro to distro when the "same software" is involved but if you use the format for the distro of your choice you will avoid a lot of problems.

It is probably one of the RPM packages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPM_Package_Manager) if RedHat was singled out or a DEB (http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/ubuntu-linux-how-do-i-install-deb-packages/) one for Ubuntu, which comes from the Debian stable. There are also generic approaches to compile the source.

[pangea33]

I don't mean to underestimate what you already know, Relztrah, but it's possible that the response wasn't crystal clear if you're not already familiar with Linux.

I just wanted to add that Ubuntu is pretty amazing at this point and I've never had problems with it fully recognizing any of my hardware that wasn't ancient.

Having said that, the machine you referred to appears to be a Pentium III clocked at less than 800mhz. If you do end up installing a Linux distro running Gnome, you're likely to find that you get poor performance on that machine.

I am running Ubuntu on a 2ghz Athlon XP with 2gb of ram and wouldn't really want to step down to anything less.

[jlreich]

A lot hardware is recognised and configured during install without issue these days. If there are specific drivers for your hardware and distro you are golden. If not then as Paul said there is likely a work around and/or a generic driver to get things going.

That being said there are pitfalls. I have been running a distro based on Ubuntu as my main OS for the last couple months or so and love it. Only real reason to boot into windows is to play games (will be working more on that in times to come). But I have run into some issues. The most important one, for me at least, was getting fan control first for my nVidia video card, and then the more difficult one to find answers for was when I just upgraded to an ATI card and finding fan control for it. Not to mention the "white screen of death" after I swapped cards. Fan control is very important because my ATI card was running almost 70C idle at stock fan speeds. :eek:

All these things were not difficult once I found the proper info. Actually finding the info was the PITA. :p Which is why I am planning on making a thread about how I fixed the issues mentioned above. Hopefully it will make it easier for others to find and if nothing else it will be an easy place for me to find the info once again if I need it. :)

There were a couple other issues that were fairly easy to find info about such as getting my surround sound working properly. Minor things like that.

Really none of these things are very difficult, just different than windows and it takes a bit of learning.

Actually I am excited because the distro I run, Ultimate Edition 2.1, is now updated to 2.2 and based on the newest Ubuntu 9.04. DVD is burned and ready. Had today off and was going to install it but ended up being fairly busy. I will probably install it next weekend. :)