Never used Linux before, dual-booting a laptop, hardware problems


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I have a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7413 Laptop, with the RAM upgraded to 4gb and the HDD upgraded to 250GB.

I cloned my stock drive to a 200gig partition on the new drive and let Ubuntu partition the rest.

Anway, Ubuntu and Vista both dual-boot fine, now that Ubuntu has been Installed, I needed help on installing drivers for devices it could not detect such as my WiFi hardware, Sound hardware, and others.

I installed the 64bit version of Ubuntu 7.10.

According to Vista's device manager, I have a Realtek RTL8187B Wireless 802.11b/g USB 2.0 WiFi card and the sound hardware is simply listed as "Realtek High Definition Audio"

A friend told me to go to Synaptic Package Manager and check everything in the "Ubuntu Software" and "Updates" tabs, then to find the "Windows Wireless Drivers" WiFi update and install it. Although this didnt seem to do much since there were no drivers listed in the app.

Afterwards, he told me to try to install this: http://danmarner.blogspot.com/2008/01/rtl8...r-works-on.html

But after enabling it with the sudo ./wlan0up command I couldent get it to connect to my WiFi network (granted, I have a slightly strange setup, static IPS and WEP 128) and after this I couldent even connect through a wired setup until I rebooted Linux.

So anyway, I am compeltely clueless on what to do, I have been using Windows for years, but I have no idea how to even install applications or how the navigate through the filesystem, I was barely able to setup my wired connection.

Is there any way I can make Ubuntu scan my system for any hardware it can detect that it has no drivers installed for the way Windows can? It would make it a lot easier to identify what it has not been able to setup/find drivers for. I know that at the very least it cannot install my WiFi and sound card, possibly my Bluetooth and 3D hardware as well, and I have no idea what else.

At this point I just simply installed every system Update that Ubuntu warned me about, I am not sure what to do next.

Any help would be appreciated, Thanks.

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Sound: make sure you are not muted. Seriously, this happens a surprisingly large number of times.

WiFi: I don't have experience with that. I do know that some chipsets have specificications open enough for Open Source programmers to code for it, and will be natively supported in Linux. Sounds like you aren't so lucky, and have some from a manufacturer that does not cooperate with the developers. In those cases, something like ndiswrapper has often been used to piggy-back off the Windows driver to make it work in Linux that way. Not sure if it requires a 32-bit build or not. :unsure:

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