Drivers

The term drivers refers to the software that connects the functionality of hardware components with software components of the operating system, the front-end GUI (graphical user interface) of the OS, various software utilities, and dedicated programs that we use for all kinds of practical and entertainment purposes.

Linux distro's automatically install hardware drivers during install and during updates and upgrades of these OSes. These drivers are generally open-source and libre, meaning that they can be freely edited and distributed.

Propretiary Drivers

Some Linux users, however, choose to replace the libre drivers with propretiary drivers. These are drivers provided by the companies who produced the hardware in question. These softwares are shared but are legally owned by the companies. Their source code might be inaccessible, but could be accessible too. There is a difference between software being legally open source or effectively open source. The first refers to the licensing of the software, the second to the practical reality of the manner in which the data of the software is available.

Many Linux users will avoid using propretiary software out of ethical considerations. Others do not really care, and still others give priority to their professional or entertainement needs.

Graphics Drivers

A clear example are drivers for integrated graphics chips and PCI graphical processor units, aka graphic cards. These components bring a very deep technology on their own, used for display projection. Programs that make use of high quality graphics: design applications, videoplayers, video games, etc., make use of highly complex hard- and software. Graphics can vary widly in technological features and therefor drvers for these components are complicated to create.

There are open source and libre drivers that work pretty well for said tehcnologies, but they still do not outperform propretiary drivers, in most cases. Hence, many people install propretiary drivers for their graphic cards.

Installing propretiary drivers

STEP 1: Check current sound devices and drivers

check audio devices & drivers

Output:

check audio devices & drivers

In this case listed as device is the NVIDIA Corporation's GP107GL, which is the internal name of the GTX 1050Ti graphics card. 'Kernel module' refers to the currently used audio driver: it is named snd_hda_intel.

STEP 2: Aligning the Kernel

Make sure the kernel of your OS is the latest. You can find out which is the latest release version by checking the website of the distributing organisation of your Linux distro. Then run the terminal command that lists your OS version and next the command that lists your kernel version. If they differ from the latest released kernel version, write down the one you need. Next, head over to your synaptic package manager and enter the mane and search for the right kernel software. You will see two programs listed:

  • linux-headers...
  • linux-image...

You need to install both.

Once the download and installation are completed, reboot your system. First thing you do when booted into your OS, is to run the terminal command for listing the current kernel version again. If the new kernel version is indeed listed, your upgrade was successful and you can head over to step 3.

STEP 3: Installing the Propretiary Driver

Install the propretiary driver via your OSes designated driver update application. Trying to download and install drivers yourself, directly from the producer of your graphics card, is tricky and can easily mess up your system.

STEP 4: Reboot

Like with most installations, rebooting is necessary to gain full functionality of the changes you made. During shutdown your system will release all former data states and running processes of your software out of your system's RAM and CPU, and during boot it will then, during startup, initialize all the new changes you have made.