Ok, this is sort of two questions at once:

Scenario:
Just installed KUbuntu 9.10 on my HP dv5000 laptop. I suppose everything went fine, at least there were no errors.

My first question is "How can I tell if I am missing drivers for devices on the system?" Obviously, in Windows you can view the Device Manager and it will have nice little exclamation points next to hardware that has missing or invalid drivers.

Is there some way to see this in Linux?


Second question (network adapters):

Using LSPCI and IFCONFIG, I can see my network adapters listed. However, I can't seem to get connected to anything. If I open up the "Manage Connections" option from the network tray icon it pulls up the window titled "Configure - KDE Control Module" and has a few tabs for Wired, Wireless, VPN, and DSL connections.

Under the Wired and Wireless tabs, there is nothing listed at all. There are options to Add or Edit connections, but as of writing this, the connection lists are blank. I am making an assumption here that there should be SOMETHING in those lists if the adapters are present. Though, I could be wrong.

So, the question is, how can I verify that the adapters are installed and working correctly (like I said, they are visible in ifconfig and lspci). I just can't seem to use them.

I would provide screen prints of the commands, but the laptop has no network connection, so I have no way of getting the output up here.

Update:

Ok, so I did manage to get the network connections working. Cable connection was non-computer related. Wireless issue turned out to be driver / firmware related.

The following three pages helped in getting everything working:
http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/...devicefirmware
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...2&postcount=72
http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1169555

Once I had an internet connection via cable, I was able to use apt to install what I needed. The following two commands + reboot were all I needed to get the WLAN card working.



As for the first question which remains unanswered. Is there some way to see what devices are missing (or have invalid) drivers? I can't imagine that Windows has had this since 1998 and Linux still doesn't have an equivalent.

Yes.

hwinfo --netcard

hwinfo --usb

and you always can read the man page: "man hwinfo"