Finding hardware components that work with SUSE Linux
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Q:
Is there some easy way to find out if a specific piece of hardware will work with SUSE Linux? I'm looking at some printer purchases, and other odds and ends, and want to make sure everything will play nice together.
A:
Absolutely. There's a nifty Component DataBase (CDB) at SUSE.com, which lets you check whether or not specific hardware components are supported by SUSE Linux. Simply enter the designation of the hardware component and/or the manufacturer name and/or the hardware category in the search form.
For example, select the category graphics adapter and enter elsa as the manufacturer. Subsequently, all graphics adapters of the manufacturer Elsa are listed. The column Support status shows whether the respective hardware component is supported by SUSE Linux. The search can be narrowed by entering the designation or part of the designation of the graphics adapter. The search is case-insensitive.
If you are not sure about the exact designation of the hardware component, enter only part of the product designation. For example, the search string geforce lists all graphics adapters using a Geforce chipset. Unfortunately, the use of wildcards such as * or ? is not yet possible but will be implemented shortly.
Instead of searching for designations, you may also search for hardware IDs. For example, the command lspci -n lists the IDs of the PCI cards utilized in the respective machine.
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