website for looking up hardware compatibility?

[habilis]

Can someone share a website where you can look whether a hardware device is linux compatible?

All the websites I've gone to are useless.

[Segfault]

What piece of hardware you have in mind?

[habilis]

At the moment its an AOpen cardbus ethernet card, model ALP-330. But I have a hard time looking up all sorts of things.

[MikeTbob]

Why not download a LiveCD and run it on the hardware? That is the ultimate hardware compatibility test.

[Bemk]

Actually the ultimate test is installation, as I have had enough devices that didn't work on a live cd but did on the full install.

[oz]

Linux reportedly works with more hardware than any other operating system so the chances are always good that any certain piece of hardware will be compatible.

That said, a truly accurate hardware database would be difficult to achieve since hardware needs to be configured properly to work correctly, and things such as firmware and driver versions used can make a difference in whether or not it works at any given moment. On the other hand, if a piece of hardware works with one Linux distribution it should be compatible with other distributions if the hardware is installed and configured correctly.

There are some hardware compatibility databases out there, but I've never found one that was worth linking to, so like the others said above, actually testing your hardware under Linux is the best way to find out if it's compatible.

If you are wondering about hardware that hasn't been purchased yet, there's a very good chance that it's compatible, or that it will be very soon because most drivers are included with the Linux kernel and new kernel releases are coming out all the time. If you purchase a new hardware model that was made available within just the last few weeks, it may or may not be compatible at this moment.

[Bemk]

I know some Ubuntu specific tables of tested hardware. Those also include links to manuals on how to configure your system. I don't know how to find it again, but I know it's out there as it helped me install some of my devices (even though just 2 weren't working as they should). Those tables were for laptops by the way, and I don't know of any providing info on desktop systems.

[alf55]

Can someone share a website where you can look whether a hardware device is linux compatible?

All the websites I've gone to are useless.

If you have a running live CD/DVD/flash system. Do (as root)

lspci  -n

put its output on a flash drive if you need to switch to something else to connect to the internet. Goto Debian HCL; Debian GNU/Linux device driver check & report and paste the output of the "lspci -n" output.