Hi Bob, Thanks for the very informative email. I love to learn all this from you nice people. I really hope to master things fast enough so I can soon contribute something to these very reach mailing lists. I adore Debian and the people who play around with it.
I will buy my new laptop (this or another model) within one or two weeks and will post of my success or failure. Nima On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Bob Proulx <[email protected]> wrote: > Nima Azarbayjany wrote: > > I did in fact thought of doing this but it is not doable for me. What is > > the most general way of determining whether a specific piece of hardware > is > > supported by Debian? Things on the web seem quite confusing to me. > > Debian uses the Linux kernel (the Linux in Debian GNU/Linux!) and > therefore supports pretty much everything the upstream Linux kernel > supports. It is the same kernel. That much is pretty simple. The > patches applied specifically for Debian are rather small by comparison > to most other distros. > > The first point where it gets confusing is when a hardware driver's > distribution license legally prevents it from being freely > distributed. Debian will be legally bound in that case and can't > distribute the driver even if one exists. > > The second often confusing point is when a driver exists but only in a > non-free format. Again in this case Debian won't distribute it > because it conflicts with a basic rule of Debian's "Social Contract" > which is that "Debian will remain 100% free". This is a stand that is > taken because Debian feels it important enough to do. As a political > topic this issue gets a *lot* of discussion on the debian-devel > mailing list, please let's not debate it here. But please do read > Debian's Social Contract to understand the published rules. > > http://www.debian.org/social_contract > > Having said all of that the nvidia driver isn't a free driver. This > is why it can't be installed automatically at debian-installer time. > It has previously been made available in the non-free repository. You > would need to specifically install it from non-free if you wanted it. > The non-free repository officially isn't part of Debian. It is a > contribution. But it is there nonetheless. NVIDIA uses the linux > driver themselves and therefore it has generally been of good quality. > > So in my mind the best question to ask is whether the nvidia driver in > non-free is new enough to support the 9200M GS. If so then it should > work. I would expect that it would work. The PTS page at > http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers.html lists > the current version in Lenny at 173.14.09. A posting here at > http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjUxNA says that > 173.14.05 and later should support GeForce 9 Mobile parts. Better > would be to find a report of someone else who has the same machine > hardware and has reviewed it for compatibility. > > The wiki page at http://wiki.debian.org/DeviceDatabase/PCI lists the > free nv driver (perhaps not what you want) as working on the 9200. > The nvidia page at http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_18897.html lists > the GeForce 9200M GS 0x06E8 as supported. > > If you decide to try it please post your results. Then when the > next person searches for this combination they will get a review > noting it as either success or failure. > > Good luck! > > Bob > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) > > iD8DBQFJuBl40pRcO8E2ULYRAsIfAJ95SpYgj8BM/+3Hm/QYKkyh3StUlACeM4s5 > zGPpknApX0jrgrZ1EQv02Aw= > =qtiB > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > >
