I just read Free Software Magazine's article about the state of Linux hardware support. While I agree in many ways about the lack of vendor support for Linux, there is another side to the story. Think about the last time you bought a piece of hardware that worked perfectly with Linux.

When you buy a new PC, laptop or server and install a Linux you want to know what hardware is actually in the Linux box and more importantly which piece of hardware is supported by the kernel out of the box and which needs special tweaking with modules to get it work. Here is a list of commands which should help you to troubleshoot your hardware and find some information about it.

Many Linux users are after lobbying hardware manufacturers for open-source graphics drivers or specifications for complex pieces of hardware, but an effort is underway to get hardware specifications for something very simple, a remote control.

How many times have you searched in several places for information about your hardware ? This happens often when we are asking for a solution to some problem in a forum. The first thing you’re asked to do is tell what your hardware specs are. Instead of going through all the proc filesystem gathering the information, I find the ls* family of tools very useful.

If there is one Linux myth that must be put to bed, it's that desktop Linux has terrible hardware support out of the box. This is compete nonsense. As a matter of fact, there has been talk that to the degree of mainstream support for hardware, it rivals anything seen with Windows or OS X. Again, this is with mainstream hardware.

One of the things that many people buying new computer or other hardware consider is the hardware compatibility with GNU/Linux. Actually many people do not even think about that. They just go to the shop, buy something that they liked and after that go home and install some distribution.

"Richard Stallman answered a query of mine today, regarding the need for free hardware - that is, hardware which the public is not restricted from understanding, so we can write free software drivers for that hardware..."

A microprocessor does more than just blindly run whatever instructions are loaded into its front end, without regard for where those instructions came from. Microprocessors are in fact "aware" of the OS, and they provide direct hardware support for enforcing divisions between components of the hardware/software stack that I described in the previous article.

What is open source hardware? Briefly, these are projects that creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and "board" files to recreate the hardware - they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source hardware like Linux, but hardware centric.