How to install driver?
 

Hi all,


I am completely new to linux. I am using Red Hat Enterprise Edition WS 4 to my new hp 530 laptop.

RedHat did not recognize the VGA driver. I downloaded it but I do not know how to install it. (I was expecting something like exe files in windows )

I am waiting for your help. Thanks in advance.

From what I can tell, the HP 530 has an Intel 940 or 945 graphics chip. You shouldn't need to install any new drivers, the i810 should come with the distro. You may have to tell X to use it though, either thorough manually editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, or using a system configuration utility that comes with RedHat. Also, that laptop appears to be widescreen, Intel did not include the proper modes in the VBIOS to enable the widescreen by default, you will need a hack, like 915resolution to allow the proper resolution.

That said, RHEL is from 2005, your laptop is basically from 2007. It would be in your best interest to upgrade to a later release.

I tried all intel graphics drivers on my distro but none of it works. What distro do you recommend me? Would you please tell me how to install the driver that I downloaded?

Thanks

I installed Fedora 8 on my laptop with a similar configuration, the video drivers were setup automatically and I didn't have to touch anything.

Installation instructions should have came with what you downloaded. I'm not sure if it will even be installable on the older Xorg version in RHEL 4.

Anyway, How can I install a driver? Which file (extension) I should run and how? I have also problems defining my sound driver. It is conexant high definition audio.

Typically, with any OS, older drivers & newer hardware don't mix easily. As elliott678 has explained, your best bet is to upgrade to a newer version. Fedora, BTW, is the free desktop version of Red Hat. And of course, there are many upgrades to RHEL 5. Go here for more info.

Cheers

As elliott678 and you recommend, I will download Fedora 8.

Thanks for help.

The situation now that the color mode is " Million of colors" and the screen resolution is " 800*600" and it cannot be made larger.

If any one can give me a hint to setup the graphics driver until I finish downloading fedora 8, I would appreciate it much.

Thanks.

That depends ... what exactly did you download? If you downloaded a tarball (a .tar.gz) of the driver, you generally extract it (tar -xzvf filename.tar.gz) and change into the extracted directory. There should be a file called README or INSTALL that has directions for installing the driver. Generally drivers are distributed as kernel modules. You'll need to build the driver, install it into /lib/modules/<kernel version>/kernel/drivers/video, then edit the xorg.conf to tell it to use the new video driver (you may need to edit other things in here as well), and re-start X. The aforementioned README and INSTALL files ought to provide a bit more info on this.

In general it will just be much easier to upgrade to something more modern. Red Hat workstation 4 is an old stable release, meaning it's best used for servers and environments that require lots of stability in the software stack. I would not recommend it for a new-ish laptop.

What I download is RPM file. How to use it?

Do you recommend me with fedora 8 or ubuntu 7.04 ?

Thanks

RPM i think means redhat package manager and to install and RPM file,

go to the terminal and select your directory and type the following

rpm -Uvh filename.rpm

I'm still a newbie trying out Linux but the command above works for me. So all the best