Re: Proprietary drivers management

[Georgi Naplatanov <gosho@oles.biz>]

On 12/9/20 7:08 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> Georgi Naplatanov wrote:
>> On 12/8/20 4:47 AM, Victor Sudakov wrote:
>>>
>>> 3. What is a "driver" after all in Linux terms? A kernel module, an
>>> Xserver loadable module? How do you "install a driver"? (in FreeBSD you
>>> either enable/load a kernel module, or make something like
>>> xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so available to the Xserver).
>>>
>>
>>
>> drivers can be:
>>
>>  - kernel space only - Network Interface Card (NIC) for example, USB,
>> SATA controllers, etc.
> 
> They come in the form of *.ko files under /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/,
> correct?

Correct.

>>  - kernel space + user space drivers - video drivers
> 
> These user space video drivers probably come as *.so modules for the
> Xserver, like in FreeBSD?

Probably.

>>  - user space only drivers - printers, scanners, etc.
> 
> These are not very interesting (like ghostscript printer "drivers" etc).
>>
>>
>>> How do you "install a driver"?
>>
>> It depends how particular driver is packaged what kind it is. If the
>> driver is included in Linux kernel then you don't have to do anything.
> 
> Are there .deb packages (other than linux-image-*.deb itself ) which
> install kernel drivers?
> 

There are meta packages for Nvidia proprietary drivers in Debian repository.


Kind regards
Georgi