On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 11:35 PM, Bob Proulx
<bob@proulx.com> wrote:
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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