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Table of Contents
dCore System Software
Get hardware running on your dCore install - drivers, firmware, kernel modules, tips and examples:
Hardware requires drivers and some hardware also requires firmware. A decent summary may be “firmware allows the hardware to “do” stuff and drivers allow software to interact with the hardware”. As dCore aims to keep kernel size small, specific kernel modules may also require installation to get hardware running.
As hardware varies the user is required to be familiar with it's requirements. This may involve online research, comparing hardware installation on another working distribution or asking on the forum. The following commands are helpful to identify system hardware:
- 'lspci' (package 'pciutils')
- 'lsusb' (package 'usbutils')
- 'hwinfo' (package 'hwinfo')
- 'lshw' (package 'lshw')
It is recommended all drivers, firmware and kernel modules be installed onboot (ie. added to sceboot.lst) using the sce-import -b command.
dCore Firmware
Some firmware is available in the dCore repository. Use the sce-searchprebuilt command to view a list of what is available then sce-import -b <SCE> to install. For Ubuntu-based dCore, firmware is contained in the packages linux-firmware and linux-firmware-nonfree and should also be installed to run at boot using sce-import -b <SCE>. Note some firmware is distributed in the linux-image package, that is together with the kernel. Loading that into dCore would not be productive. Instead the firmware files need to be extracted individually and saved for persistence, as per this ethernet firmware installation example.
