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

  • stravanasu@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    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!

    • eldavi@lemmy.ml
      2·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • rotopenguin@infosec.pubEnglish
        2·
        3 months ago

        Also do “dmesg | grep -i firmware” to see what firmware loads the kernel squirted into the various device controllers.

      • stravanasu@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Fantastic, this is extremely helpful, thank you! 🥇 I wanted to test a couple of distros for my Thinkpad, and I’ll make sure to check and save this kind of information from live USBs.