Debian jessie hardware compatibility

Generally speaking, modern Linux distributions can work with almost any hardware. It is possible that it won't get the most out of the hardware (for example, a brand new model graphics card might not work with 3D accelleration in Linux, because the vendor doesn't release specifications and/or drivers and volunteers haven't yet figured out how it works), but the hardware will generally work. Things like: you might be able to use your scanner, but not its hardware buttons; your keyboard will allow you to input text, but the multimedia buttons may take some configuration tweaking to get working; and so on.

There are, however, a few things that can trip you up. You have come across one of them: firmware. This is further exacerbated by Debian's rather strict Debian Free Software Guidelines, which are a part of the Debian project's social contract. Other distributions have laxer requirements for what is included in the standard distribution and thus work more readily. Whether this trade-off is worth it depends heavily on your political opinion about free software; if you want software at no cost, then another distribution may be better suited to your needs, but if you want free software as defined by the Free Software Foundation and the GNU projects, then Debian is probably one of the better choices.

Specifically for RTL (Realtek) firmware on Debian, that firmware is available in the non-free area of the Debian repositories. In order to use this, your choices are:

Configure your system to allow for installation of non-free packages. This isn't difficult; it involves updating a single text file under /etc/apt/sources.list* (either sources.list directly, or one of the files under sources.list.d) and running apt-get update. I believe there is also a GUI somewhere in Debian's graphical package manager Synaptic to do the same thing. After that you will be able to install non-free packages using apt-get install (and you won't know whether the package you are installing is from main or non-free).
Download and install the specific non-free packages you need separately. For example, you can download the firmware-realtek package manually and install it using dpkg --install. This is essentially the same thing that apt-get install does, except apt-get has features to download packages itself, intelligently handle dependencies, keep track of updates, etc. This way, you know exactly which non-free packages you have installed on your system, but you will need to handle upgrading the packages manually. Particularly for firmware, the latter should not be a major consideration, as firmware is updated very rarely.

One of the things that Debian prides itself on is its strict adherence to the principles of free software. If you want a Free operating system, this is generally a good thing, but it also means that some software packages which are available on other distributions possibly even as a part of the default installation, are much more involved to get working on Debian.

That said, assuming you can get networking to work on your freshly installed system, most other issues are easily solvable with some web searching. There is a huge amount of information out there on how to get various pieces of hardware working fully with Linux in general, including Debian. (Gentoo's and Arch's documentation are also exemplary, even though not every specific command, package name and file location will apply to Debian.)

a CVn

Posted 2015-09-05T11:23:10.290

Reputation: 26 553

@HimanshuShekhar Glad it worked. If you found that this answer fully addresses your concerns, please indicate so by accepting the answer by clicking on the checkmark outline next to the voting arrows. That will tell the community that you feel your question has been answered. Thank you. – a CVn – 2015-09-07T09:22:19.557

Debian jessie hardware compatibility

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