Debian GNU/Linux 10 supports ten major architectures and several variations of each architecture known as ”flavors”.

Det här dokumentet täcker in installationen för 64-bit PC --arkitekturen med Linux-kärnan. Om du letar efter information om någon av de andra arkitekturerna som Debian stöder kan du se på sidorna för Debian-porteringar.

Både AMD64 och Intel 64-processorer stöds.

From a technical point of view, laptops are normal PCs, so all information regarding PC systems applies to laptops as well. Installations on laptops nowadays usually work out of the box, including things like automatically suspending the system on closing the lid and laptop specfic hardware buttons like those for disabling the wifi interfaces (”airplane mode”). Nonetheless sometimes the hardware vendors use specialized or proprietary hardware for some laptop-specific functions which might not be supported. To see if your particular laptop works well with GNU/Linux, see for example the Linux Laptop pages.

Multiprocessor support — also called ”symmetric multiprocessing” or SMP — is available for this architecture. The standard Debian 10 kernel image has been compiled with SMP-alternatives support. This means that the kernel will detect the number of processors (or processor cores) and will automatically deactivate SMP on uniprocessor systems.

Having multiple processors in a computer was originally only an issue for high-end server systems but has become common in recent years nearly everywhere with the introduction of so called ”multi-core” processors. These contain two or more processor units, called ”cores”, in one physical chip.

Debian's support for graphical interfaces is determined by the underlying support found in X.Org's X11 system, and the kernel. Basic framebuffer graphics is provided by the kernel, whilst desktop environments use X11. Whether advanced graphics card features such as 3D-hardware acceleration or hardware-accelerated video are available, depends on the actual graphics hardware used in the system and in some cases on the installation of additional ”firmware” images (see Avsnitt 2.2, ”Enheter som kräver fast programvara”).

On modern PCs, having a graphical display usually works out of the box. In very few cases there have been reports about hardware on which installation of additional graphics card firmware was required even for basic graphics support, but these have been rare exceptions. For quite a lot of hardware, 3D acceleration also works well out of the box, but there is still some hardware that needs binary blobs to work well.

Details on supported graphics hardware and pointing devices can be found at https://wiki.freedesktop.org/xorg/. Debian 10 ships with X.Org version 7.7.

Almost any network interface card (NIC) supported by the Linux kernel should also be supported by the installation system; drivers should normally be loaded automatically. This includes most PCI/PCI-Express cards as well as PCMCIA/Express Cards on laptops.

ISDN stöds men inte under installationen.

Stöd för punktskriftsskärmar bestäms av det underliggande stödet som finns i brltty. De flesta skärmar fungerar under brltty, anslutna via antingen en serieport, USB eller Bluetooth. Information om vilka punktskriftsenheter som stöds kan hittas på webbplatsen för brltty. Debian GNU/Linux 10 levereras med brltty version 5.6.

Stöd för talsyntes (maskinvara) bestäms av det underliggande stödet som finns i speakup. speakup har endast stöd för integrerade kort och external enheter anslutnas till en serieport (inga USB-, serie-till-USB- eller PCI-adaptrar stöds). Information om stöd för talsyntesenheter (maskinvara) kan hittas på webbplatsen för speakup. Debian GNU/Linux 10 levereras med speakup version 3.1.6.

Linux supports a large variety of hardware devices such as mice, printers, scanners, PCMCIA/CardBus/ExpressCard and USB devices. However, most of these devices are not required while installing the system.

USB hardware generally works fine. On some very old PC systems some USB keyboards may require additional configuration (see Avsnitt 3.6.5, ”Maskinvaruproblem att se upp för”). On modern PCs, USB keyboards and mice work without requiring any specific configuration.