My laptop is an MSI Sword 15 A11UD. But I’m really looking for a program that analyses and projects problem areas and supported/unsupported hardware
I find quite often that the Live version of a distro will work perfectly, but after install some hardware won’t work anymore.
yes, that will happen.
the live distro’s come included with a lot of preloaded driver/firmware that is not included with a regular installation for a myriad of reasons; but you can use lspci and lsmod from the live environment to identify the proper software you need to add to your regular installation to get that hardware working.
It’s just weird that after install it can’t detect my hardware and pull the drivers it needs like windows does.
Sometimes it’s an ideological issue. Some distributions don’t ship nonfree drivers, some do, but require you to manually install them, and some have trouble making up their mind. This last is where you get live cds that automatically load the drivers needed for your hardware, but when you actually install, things aren’t working anymore.
Thank you, that’s useful info, I didn’t know about this. Could you be so kind to share some link, or say something more, about lspci and lsmod and how to proceed from them to identifying which drivers one should install? Cheers!
here’s an example using my wifi card on my laptop; here i use lscpi and i’ve copy/pasted the stanza that pertains to the wifi card:
me@laptop:~$ lspci -v
[REMOVED]
00:14.3 Network controller: Intel Corporation Alder Lake-P PCH CNVi WiFi (rev 01)
DeviceName: Onboard - Ethernet
Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wi-Fi 6(802.11ax) AX201 160MHz 2x2 [Harrison Peak]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16, IOMMU group 9
Memory at 601d18c000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi
Kernel modules: iwlwifi
[REMOVED]
i can see that the driver name is iwlwifi and i can use that to look for related modules using lsmod:
me@laptop:~$ lsmod | grep iwlwifi
iwlwifi 598016 1 iwlmvm
cfg80211 1318912 3 iwlmvm,iwlwifi,mac80211
now i know all of the module names and i can either google them to learn how to install them or i can continue further with the package manager on the installation to further backwards engineer it. (googling is faster).
as i mentioned earlier there are caveats: downstream distros tend to use a slightly older version of their base distros so you also need to make sure that you’re using the same version of the driver and kernel and adjust accordingly if it doesn’t start working right away.
