When's best to install critical system drivers?

[Guest mennisco]

New to Mandriva, and still only about a year with open source. Used to the correct sequence of driver installs under Redmond: OS, chipset eg. IDE, and other bus drivers, [like Nforce], then CPU, then Ati or Nvidia whichever. All before you do anything else - sorry I'm still thinking 64 bit Windows, nearly same with 32 bit except AMD has to wait til after SP2. My experience with Linux has been there's inevitably a kernel driver and a graphics driver [if NVidia, yes] offered up immediately upon updating and it's made clear you do this first and reboot. [well the CPU part especially]

 

With Linux I still don't know if I'm gonna need a certain amount of updated hardware functionality through the kernel and also reduced risk of dependency-related problems [like say some crucial driver not installing cuz some of the library packages weren't yet up to prime time ...that already has snagged me a couple of times today.] Is there any roughly agreed upon "best " procedure to follow here?

 

Thanks!!

[ianw1974]

Providing the distro has the kernels compiled good, you should have practically everything you need to get your system up and running. Sometimes however, you're missing raid controller drivers, or ide controller drivers, but you can install this prior to installing the operating system.

 

It's a case of trying it and see how you go. See what works and what doesn't. And if you get stuck, come and ask here, and we help you proceed. Chances are you're worrying about nothing though, and it'll just install normally.

 

If you have Windows on the machine already, and want to test if Linux will work, download a Live CD, like Knoppix. This is a distro that runs from CD. You can then see what works and what doesn't, and then decide from there before actually installing anything. Knoppix will also give you access to your hard disks as well, so you can see if this is a problem.