driver installation????

[Mighty JD]

Is there a common way to install drivers for devices? I am trying to install a NIC and I read to NHF and it didn't help a bit. I also want to update my NVidia display drivers. What a pain! I am new to Linux and I want to learn it well but I am truly WINDOWS SPOILED! :mad:

[Mighty JD]

BTW I am running mandrake 7.2

[Craig McPherson]

For the NIC, find out what Linux driver it uses (tulip, rtl8139, etc), then see if you have that driver compiled as a module with your current kernel (or directly into the kernel). If not, you'll need to recompile.

If you have the driver compiled as a module, you can just do "modprobe tulip", and it'll detect the card (unless it's ISA, in which case the process is more complex). Once the driver is in the kernel and the network interface is configured, you can just bring up the network interface and you're ready to rock.