Nima Azarbayjany wrote: > I did in fact thought of doing this but it is not doable for me. What is > the most general way of determining whether a specific piece of hardware is > supported by Debian? Things on the web seem quite confusing to me.
Debian uses the Linux kernel (the Linux in Debian GNU/Linux!) and therefore supports pretty much everything the upstream Linux kernel supports. It is the same kernel. That much is pretty simple. The patches applied specifically for Debian are rather small by comparison to most other distros. The first point where it gets confusing is when a hardware driver's distribution license legally prevents it from being freely distributed. Debian will be legally bound in that case and can't distribute the driver even if one exists. The second often confusing point is when a driver exists but only in a non-free format. Again in this case Debian won't distribute it because it conflicts with a basic rule of Debian's "Social Contract" which is that "Debian will remain 100% free". This is a stand that is taken because Debian feels it important enough to do. As a political topic this issue gets a *lot* of discussion on the debian-devel mailing list, please let's not debate it here. But please do read Debian's Social Contract to understand the published rules. http://www.debian.org/social_contract Having said all of that the nvidia driver isn't a free driver. This is why it can't be installed automatically at debian-installer time. It has previously been made available in the non-free repository. You would need to specifically install it from non-free if you wanted it. The non-free repository officially isn't part of Debian. It is a contribution. But it is there nonetheless. NVIDIA uses the linux driver themselves and therefore it has generally been of good quality. So in my mind the best question to ask is whether the nvidia driver in non-free is new enough to support the 9200M GS. If so then it should work. I would expect that it would work. The PTS page at http://packages.qa.debian.org/n/nvidia-graphics-drivers.html lists the current version in Lenny at 173.14.09. A posting here at http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjUxNA says that 173.14.05 and later should support GeForce 9 Mobile parts. Better would be to find a report of someone else who has the same machine hardware and has reviewed it for compatibility. The wiki page at http://wiki.debian.org/DeviceDatabase/PCI lists the free nv driver (perhaps not what you want) as working on the 9200. The nvidia page at http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_18897.html lists the GeForce 9200M GS 0x06E8 as supported. If you decide to try it please post your results. Then when the next person searches for this combination they will get a review noting it as either success or failure. Good luck! Bob
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