Installin drivers and such

[OttawaNoob]

I'm a noob with Linux and I would like to know how to install drivers/software with Ubuntu.. Can someone lead me to a good place to find articles and help?

[MikeTbob]

See the first three articles here.
Linux Tutorials, HOWTO's & Reference Material - Linux Forums

[techieMoe]

I'm a noob with Linux and I would like to know how to install drivers/software with Ubuntu.. Can someone lead me to a good place to find articles and help?

For the most part you don't need to install drivers in Ubuntu. There are quite a few device drivers included out of the box. Is there a specific device you're having trouble getting to work?

[D-cat]

I doubt it, you're not all that wrong. In my experience, there are just some computers Ubuntu (or any Live Debian distro) will refuse to boot on (these are usually big name brand machines I suspect of deliberately sabotaging to confuse udev or something, they tend to lock at the hardware detection). These computers fare better with live distros that don't try so hard to detect your hardware but rather start you out in a basic setup and let the user figure out the configuration (e.g.Puppy).

The su vs. sudo is just a mentality thing that's designed to make things more secure for home users whilst still making the admin work not too difficult. I wouldn't do things that way on a real multi-user server.

Personally, when it comes to a bunch of things, I like SuSE better; it has better compatibility and the Yast menu structure is a model for all Linux distros. It's secure and much easier to set up and maintain IMO. Unfortunately, I have a lot of aging hardware that still runs fine, but SuSE has some nastily inefficient code that has left me in the dust for requirements where Ubuntu not only still runs, but runs faster.

If these posts are deleted, I don't think it'll be about bad-mouthing Ubuntu, but rather that they don't up to this point answer the original poster's question. The answers which are however:

1. Drivers (or modules as they are called in Linux) are generally plenty supported and supplied out of the box. In the certain cases where fully functioning modules are not included for either technical or legal reasons, you can usually run your unconfigured hardware's chipset line from lspci output in Google and you'll probably find the answer you are looking for. Sometimes there are auto downloading scripts, and sometimes if your hardware is really new, you'll have to build the modules (or backends) from source. Full instructions are generally supplied when such a rare and drastic measure must be taken.

2) Software is available from large servers we call Repositories. Running the Synaptic Package Manager in Ubuntu will give you a huge host of software you can download and install with only a few clicks. If for some reason the software you want is not available from the repositories, you can download and run a .deb file that is sometimes provided by the software manufacturer. You'll want to make sure your software source is trusted before you install programs not available on a repository. We discourage this is it is a major contributer of malware in the Windows mentality that we'd just as soon avoid here.

I hope this has not been a too boring or difficult explanation. I'm know for that!