Section 1.1. The Necessary Research


1.1. The Necessary Research

Few things are more frustrating than a lack of hardware support, especially when you've become used to the quick driver installs offered by Windows. In fact, Windows comes complete with a basic set of drivers that are intended to anticipate the hardware attached to your machine. Hardware manufacturers also release driver discs for devices such as video cards, network cards and scanners for Windows machines. Developing these drivers costs the hardware manufacturers a great deal of money, so for a long time it didn't make economic sense for hardware developers to supply drivers for Linux.

As Linux has gained market share within the server market, Linux driver development has improved markedly. Storage devices, RAID arrays, Ethernet cardsall have enjoyed increasing Linux driver development in the past few years.

In order to avoid the headache of missing drivers, it's important to do a little research before installing your Linux distribution. While it's unlikely that you'll have a problem with modern distributions, you'll still want to do the research just to avoid any hardware issues.

Most of the major distributions release hardware compatibility lists . These lists itemize the hardware that's known to work with the drivers included in the distributions. Red Hat/Fedora, Mandriva, and SuSE also provide hardware mailing lists for distributions from their Websites. These lists, though, tend to rely on users to help solve hardware compatibility issues after the fact, rather than providing information for users before an installation.

Additionally, there's an excellent compatibility list for Linux in general. It doesn't provide quite the degree of granularity you'll find in the manufacturer-specific lists, so it should be used as a fallback, rather than your primary source of information.

1.1.1. Hardware Compatibility Lists

1.1.2.1. Red Hat/Fedora

Red Hat's major product line is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) , which is mostly based on Red Hat's free software distribution, Fedora. Fedora is not actually maintained by Red Hat; it's maintained by the community of Fedora developers. However, Red Hat does a lot of work on Fedora, because that work flows into RHEL.

Red Hat's Hardware Catalog doesn't extend beyond RHEL to the Fedora releases, which is something that you'll need to remember when looking to the Red Hat site for Fedora support. The list provides information on CPUs, video cards, SCSI controllers, IDE controllers, network cards, modems, and sound cards.

1.1.2.2. SuSE

SuSE offers two lists: the Express Search and Extended Search. The difference between the two is that the Extended Search offers fields beyond Vendor, Device, and Category. In practice, you're likely only to need the Express Search.

1.1.2.3. Mandriva Linux

The Mandriva Linux Hardware Compatibility Database is a very comprehensive list of hardware that has been tested by the Mandriva Linux community.

1.1.2.4. General Linux

The Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO is perhaps the most comprehensive of the high-level Linux links. It was begun in 1997 and is updated as often as twice annually. It provides information on all device types and all major manufacturers.

Aside from providing interesting and useful user forums, LinuxQuestions.org also provides an outstanding list of Linux-compatible hardware. This is the most up-to-date of the high-level Linux lists, with updates appearing daily where applicable. While it's not as comprehensive as the HOWTO, the LinuxQuestions list is easily as important because of this timeliness.

Linux Compatible provides both updated lists, and forums in which users can help other users resolve existing hardware issues.




Run Your Own Web Server Using Linux & Apache
Run Your Own Web Server Using Linux & Apache
ISBN: 0975240226
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 92

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