Member Avatar for RikTelner

Virtual situation.

I am about to take my nasty hands to buy seperate hardware and build computer.
The computer will be ready, I will run image on CD and install Linux on SDD/HDD (storage).
How do I provide drivers to it? I think I have to download them from website pointing out which product of theirs did I bought and on which operation system I want to install. I probably get an ununsual file to download. How do I mount it on disc so Linux can reach and install them so I can at least try to avoid problems in future without strange codecs and drivers problems.

I think I need video card, wireless & audio card drivers, right? Did I forgot something?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by khakilang

Dani AI

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— the answers so far from , and are on target: most distributions will detect hardware and provide working drivers. Below is a short, practical checklist and a few gotchas to avoid the “no-network/no-wifi/no-video” trap on a fresh disk install.

Prepare before you install:

  • Boot a live USB and verify basic devices (video, audio, Ethernet, Wi‑Fi) so you know what will work out of the box.
  • Bring a wired Ethernet cable for the first boot — it solves most missing-driver situations by letting the installer fetch packages.
  • Download the distro’s offline firmware/drivers bundle or the vendor packages you expect to need (Wi‑Fi firmware, GPU driver packages, printer drivers) and copy them to a small USB stick. Also enable the distro’s “restricted/non‑free” repos after install if you plan to use proprietary drivers.

Quick identification and install tips (run from a live session or after install):

lspci -nnk       # list PCI devices and show kernel driver info
lsusb            # list USB devices
dmesg | grep -i firmware   # look for firmware failures the kernel logged

Those commands tell you exactly which device and which kernel module/firmware are missing. For Debian/Ubuntu derivatives you can install downloaded .deb files with sudo dpkg -i package.deb; for RPM systems use rpm -Uvh or the distro package tool.

Cautions and followups:

  • Some Wi‑Fi (Broadcom family) and some GPUs (NVIDIA/AMD) often require distribution-specific proprietary packages or firmware blobs — carry those packages if you’ll be offline.
  • If your machine uses UEFI Secure Boot, unsigned kernel modules (third‑party drivers) may be blocked; you can disable Secure Boot or use distro-signed drivers.
  • Use DKMS-packaged drivers when possible so kernel updates rebuild modules automatically.

Testing in a live session and bringing a wired network connection are the two most effective ways to avoid surprises.

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Member Avatar for rubberman

Most of the time, when you install Linux, it already has the drivers you need for your hardware, including video. Linux is NOT Windows! It will interrogate the system on boot and enable the needed drivers at that time. Sometimes you can get better performance with proprietary drivers (nVidia video cards are a good example of that), but don't bother until you really need them.

So,

  1. Don't just download and install drivers until you really need them.
  2. You don't need to mount a driver on disc. Either the package manager will do that for you, or when it is built from source it can be installed directly onto the system disc. Linux has standard ways to do that.

I have installed Linux in various forms on many systems. Usually, I don't need to deal with hardware drivers at all. This includes servers and laptops.

Member Avatar for mike_2000_17

As rubberman says, in Linux, drivers are implemented as kernel modules. Most drivers are open-source. Basically, the developement community didn't wait for hardware manufacturers to create Linux drivers for their hardware, because they could very well have waited forever, and instead, they developed open-source drivers. For the most part, these drivers are written by reverse-engineering the Windows drivers, and making "lowest common denominators" drivers (manufacturers usually re-use the same basic set of commands between models, so, a "basic" driver will work for a whole series of products).

So, this means that most drivers in Linux are open-source and can therefore be packaged with the Linux distribution (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, RHEL, etc.) installation and package-repository. This means that as you install Linux (most popular distributions anyways), it will automatically check your hardware, automatically download / install / enable all the appropriate drivers, and you will probably not have to do anything after that. It is possible that a few peripheral things are not working (e.g., wireless, microphone, webcam, etc.) or not working as well as they could (e.g., graphics card, etc.). If that's the case, you can check if there are proprietary drivers for those specific things (and installing them is easy, and there are usually simple instructions). If there are any issues after that, well, you know where to ask for help ;)

commented: Thank you. I sure know where to ask help :). +2
Member Avatar for khakilang

I am using Kubuntu and have no issue with any hardware because it come with "Additional Driver" software that it can search for propreity hardware and install the driver.

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