Unknown drivers?
 

I am running Suse 9.1 with an ASUS A7N8X motherboard which is supposed to be fully supported by Suse 9.1 however ....

everything seems to work properly but if I go to the "suseplugger" there is a lot of hardware listed as "unknown", even though it us named correctly. What does this mean? Does it mean my drivers are not installed properly? Or what?

btw - I love Suse! I can interface with windows, and run/learn Linux! Rock on yo!

Well, if you don't miss any of your hardware, I guess you don't have to worry. What's really ugly is when you can't listen to music, or get to the internet...

Sometimes hardware is listed with weird names, or what we think is one piece of hardware can be two chips or even more, needing a few drivers. If you wanna see this closely, try the lspci command (for the root user). It will list some of your hardware.

Be welcome! And by the way: I like suse too!

That's the weird part though, the driver list is correct but still "unknown". It lists my motherboard correctly and the chipset, but then it doesn't seem to install anything. It is very strange, thank god my sound and video worked.

I think the problem can be traced to nvidias chipset. Does anyone have instructions on how to install drivers, or files in general for that matter, on linux?

Have you done your YOU lately? It will give the option of installing the latest NVIDIA drivers when the YOU (YaST ONLINE UPDATE) opens the package selection you tick the boxes for the NVIDIA drivers lol hell tick all the boxes and they will update just fine. Or if you want to do it the hardway goto the NVIDIA web site and download the drivers and then make a file in the /usr/opt/driver/ directory that you make by opening the home icon on the desktop and right clicking after opening the /usr/opt directory choose new directory as you would in windoze and unzip/unpack the files into that directory that you have called drivers ( just so you know what they are you could actually stick the directory anywhere you wanted but if youre not sure the usr directory i the safest so I'm told. you should then see something called configuire, highlight and drag into the xterm window that now open and choose paste, then press enter VOILA you should be ok, if you want to install and play with any other *stuff* then best stick to a directory that does not have too much root acces so that you cannot accidentally mess the system up so in this case say you choose /home/programs/stuff and you open a new directory aclled programs and then stuff - if you put all the rubbish that you want to play with in that it will make it easier to remove after as it is in the one directory that you wont forget!

Ouch! The hardway is hard! Go YOU!

Amen to that. What is the difference between installing drivers in Suse to say Slackware? Is it much more difficult?

SuSE has ways to automate functions. Slackware expects the user knows how to do these stuff.

Installing in slackware is different, indeed. You have to compile the drivers from source, as most things in slack. For that to run well, you have to have a good notion on how the system works, where are the core packages, where are the kernel headers and sources, etc...