Greetings Folks. Thanks in advance for any help. I've been a PC user (MS DOS, Windows, Vista) for about thirty years now. Recently I bought a couple of inexpensive laptops. Acer Aspire 5515 with AMD Athalon 2650e 1600MHz processor, 3GB RAM, 160GB drive, DVD read/write, 2 USB ports, and Windows Vista Home Basic. At $350 each, I thought this was a good buy, but they don't perform like I think they should. Thinking the Vista bloat was the main problem, I decided to try one of them running Kubuntu. What an adventure! Kubuntu 8.04 ran well (understandably slow) from a live CD, with transparent access to the Internet and my USB hub (1to4). So I installed it. Immediately I get a message that for my devices to work I will need drivers that "are not free". Well, that hardly surprises me. Everything can't be free. But I have no way to get these drivers. I don't know what they are, where they are, or how to buy them. The NIC does not work, so I can't access the Internet with that laptop. But the USB ports do work so I can download drivers to a USB drive and then install them, IF I can find out what I need and where and how to get it. The window that comes up, entitled Hardware Drivers tells me that no proprietary drivers are in use on this system. It shows, under Device driver, ATI Fire GL, enabled, Not in use and Broadscom STA wireless driver, not enabled, Not in use. Any suggestions? Thanks. don
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Re: NIC drivers
There are drivers that are free, as in beer, but not free, as in freedom. Some of these are available in a Ubuntu repository called universe. You have not enabled those yet, so you have no non-free drivers yet, although it sounds like you need one.This link
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=25683
will give you some good information including how to get things from that repository.
Keep in mind that it is old and it may be that linux now has better support than something that requires taking Windows binaries.
To start with you should get to a terminal and run "lspci" which will list your pci hardware and tell you what it is.
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Re: lspci
Thanks for the information. I've tried the suggestion you said I should do first, but I guess I don't know enough yet to be able to make it work. I don't know what you mean by get to a terminal. I tried opening the Run Command box and typing in lscpi, but nothing happened, that I could see. ??Comment
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Re: NIC drivers
At run command type konsole and you will get a terminal. Then run lspci and you will see it.
You can also get a terminal (shell) by selecting K->Applications->System->Terminal.
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