Device Drivers in Fedora 18

Question

I am on the verge of a rather thorough hardware upgrade, ie. motherboard/cpu, and in addition want to migrate from XP 32 to Fedora 18 64. So, now it occurs to me that all the drivers from Windoze will be
gone--are there drivers in the Fedora CD package, or will I have to hunt them down? Actually, there may be a more basic driver issue--namely, running the CD player itself: the driver won't be loaded yet. Is this a
problem? I also have an ISO image on USB, if needed.

Answer 1

The drivers should be included in the kernel. There are no add-on drivers as such for Linux distros; the exception being proprietary video drivers and some exotic hardware that has vendor supplied
drivers. In short your system should boot and work fine.

Answer 2

I rebuilt completely some time ago and never had a problem. Don't think you will have to hunt for packages, yum does a fairly thorough search, yum is your friend.
I have never had to go out of my way to get things working except for the Fuji Xerox laser printer but the Fedora packages sem ok with that. My CDplayer never missed a beat, everything installed well. I did have
to install some extra packages but learning how makes google a real friend as well.

Answer 3

The big issue running on new hardware is video drivers, and you should be sure to test your hardware booting and running off a Live-CD image. Fedora does not include vendor drivers for some hardware, which unfortunately include video vendors ATI and Nvidia, WiFi drivers for many Broadcom network products, and a host of scanners, printers, and other things you don't need to consider to do an
install.

In other words try it first, as long as you have video (you might have to try "basic mode") and network to install, you can get installed and add drivers if and when you need them for full functionality. The reasons for not using the vendor drivers are non-technical, they install and work fine.