Supported hardware!?!

[Guest]

Hello,

I've got a notebook "HP Pavilion zv5365EA" and I want to install debian stable in it! Does it support my hardware? I am worring especially for my soundcard and my modem!
My soundcard is "SoundMAX Digital Audio"
My modem is "Agere Systems AC'97 Modem"

Does debian support these kind of hardware?

(Sorry for my bad english)

Thanks!

[Roeland]

Well, first of all, you should ask google if he knows anything about that hardware in combination with Linux. If the hardware is supported by the kernel, then Debian supports it.

http://google.com/linux

And ofcourse, there's nothing wrong with just giving it a try

-Roeland

[Guest]

But, what kernel does Debian 3.0 use?
I did search in google-linux and I did found this kind of hardware although!

[Jeroen]

Debian 3.0 (woody) uses kernel 2.4.18 on i386 hardware.

[peschmae]

I'd really recommend you to use Debian Sarge (Testing) even if it has not yet been declared stable.
You can use Kernel 2.6 from the beginning of the installation with Sarge - that makes for a lot less problems than older Kernels with new Notebooks do.

And in addition the Software is Up-To-Date, Woody is really quite old (2 years - too old for a new Desktop installation).

It is quite improbable that your modem will work out-of the box. But I think that maybe you can get it to work. Agere (former Lucent Technologies) provides Linux drivers for _some_ of their Softmodems. At least I had one working about 1.5 years ago - after some Hand-Work in setting it up.

Peschmä

[Jeroen]

Woody works fine though, and you can install the latest 2.4.x kernel package from testing/unstable if you need/want, it works fine together.

[Guest]

Thanks for the help!

[AdrianTM]

My recommandation is to use a Live CD Debian based distribution (like Mepis) and see if it picks up your hardware.