Device drivers for Ubuntu GNOME on an ASUS laptop

Question

I got a brand new ASUS laptop with Windows 10 and bunch of ASUS software, but now I need to install Ubuntu GNOME on my laptop. Before I do that I want to know what the Ubuntu installation will do about the ASUS device driver softwares like wifi, graphics, sound, etc.?

Solution

A dual boot is a system which contains two operating systems on the same computer, and can boot into both, usually with one bootloader. In Ubuntu the default bootloader is GRUB. Aside from replacing the Windows bootloader with GRUB so that the computer can boot both Ubuntu and Windows, installing Ubuntu will not affect anything else in the Windows operating system.

However after installing Ubuntu you will need to also install the drivers for wifi, graphics, etc. in Ubuntu. The built-in Additional Drivers utility will help you to do this, but it does not support the drivers for every model of graphics card and wifi adapter, so some drivers need to be installed manually from the terminal.

In order to show all the drivers that are available to be installed from the default Ubuntu repositories and are compatible with your hardware, open the terminal and type:

ubuntu-drivers devices  

Wait at least one minute for the command to scan your computer and generate the list of drivers. The output of this command will be a list of the package names and short descriptions of the available drivers. In addition to showing a list of the available open source drivers, the above command will often also identify recommended proprietary driver(s) for your system if there are any available.

ubuntu-drivers devices will not show graphics drivers that are not available from the official Ubuntu repositories, such as the AMDGPU-Pro graphics driver for Linux which is available from the official AMD website. If you have installed a proprietary graphics driver from somewhere else than the default Ubuntu repositories, ubuntu-drivers devices will confusingly sometimes show it as the recommended driver even if it is not working properly.

As mentioned in Ubuntu Documentation Wifi Docs / Wireless Troubleshooting Guide / Devices to show the eight-digit PCI.ID for your wireless device in the terminal type:

lspci -nn | grep 0280  

Then search Ask Ubuntu or Ubuntu Forums for the PCI.ID and you will find out what driver is required.

Comments

[Chai T. Rex]

The installer will typically offer you the option to try Ubuntu without installing it. You can then check whether that all works by watching a video on YouTube and so on.

[ankit7540]

Note down the graphics model and wifi adapter in your notebook. Then after installing Ubuntu, if things do not work right, you can start to look for drivers.