Installing linux/156/en
From Gender and Tech Resources
Getting a device to work
Hardware like a sound card or ethernet card, etc. have two essential pieces of software that make them function. The first is a working driver, software that lets your system talk to the hardware. The second is firmware, usually a small piece of code uploaded directly to the device and maintained by the company that develops the hardware device. You can think of the firmware as a way of programming the hardware inside the device. It is a black box, and because of that treated like hardware; there’s no accompanying source code that is freely distributed with it.