where does the NIC driver locate in the system

[Alan McKinnon]

On Tuesday 19 September 2006 16:15, Qiuli Han wrote:
> Hi folks,
> after the installation of my system, my NIC is ready to work
> but i am wondering where does the system store the driver?
> and if it is huge file which contain all the other un-used
> drivers, can i delete it (like driver.cab in windows)?

Hi Qiuli

First thing to learn is that Linux works almost, but not quite, 
entirely unlike Windows. The kernel is built differently, 
modules work differently, packages to be installed are totally 
different, and much much more.

Kernel drivers are stored somewhere in the directory structure 
below /lib/modules/<kernel_name>

My current kernel (not an Ubuntu system, but the same principle 
applies) is 2.6.16-suspend2-r8 so my modules are 
in /lib/modules/2.6.16-suspend2-r8/

I have a Braodcom gigabit NIC card and if I remember correctly 
the driver is the bnx2. A search of the modules tree shows me 
that it's 
in /lib/modules/2.6.16-suspend2-r8/kernel/drivers/net/bnx2.ko 
and it's 134k in size. For interests sake, all the modules I 
have for this kernel take up 20M disk space - not too bad.

The fact that you asked the question you did in the way that you 
asked it tells me that you are relatively new to this game. 
Unless you have ancient tiny disks, there's no valid reason to 
try and free up space by deleting archives no longer in use. 
Archives downloaded during updates are stored in /var somewhere 
and tools exist to keep this area tidy.

Again, this is not windows so don't go around deleting stuff. 
Read the man pages for apt-get, apt-cache and aptitude to get 
an idea how this all fits together. The Ubuntu developers know 
what they are doing and the system is designed to not clutter 
things up more than necessary and they do a much better job 
than you will :-)

alan