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Identify and install hardware:
One of Linux weak points is hardward, and the lack of drivers. It is getting better, but now and then yoy end up with a computer where your
webcam, tv-tuner or wificard is not working.
The first thing you do is to identify your the missing hardware.
Two good gui-tools are "lshw-gtk"(Which I prefer) or "hardinfo".
In "lshw-gtk" you have to press "Update" to see any thing. When it has finished scanning for hardware you can browse through your hardware and see what linux
automaticly found. It also show which driver the device uses. If the status is "this device hasn't been claimed" no driver has been found.
Another way is to open a terminal as root and run:
$ lspci
output:
......
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
........
Identify your device and use the numbers in the front to get further informations:
$ lspci -s 01:00.1 -v
None of the above methods are show anything about usb devices. I have not found any gui tool to list usb devices (usbview is not working).
Open a terminal as root.
install "usbutils":
$ apt-get install usbutils
To get a list of usb devices run this :
$ lsusb
You can use the ID to indentify your device. Using the -v option will show you a lot (to much) of information
To see if any driver loads or errors occure try to unplug/plug the device. Then use:
$ dmesg
it will show what happened when you plugged in the device.
The first thing to do when you have indentified your device is to search repository (use "synaptic") for a driver. Make sure that "contrib and non-free" is enabled in the source.list(se 3 Install programs)
No luck here ask mr. Google.