Q:

Where to find and install ASUS motherboard drivers for Linux

Possible Duplicate:
How to download specific ubuntu drivers for my pc 

This is my second day ever with Linux, and I had one heck of a time getting the nVidia drivers installed and working. Please, keep in mind I am very new and just starting out. 
I currently have an ASUS P8Z68-V LE motherboard and I'm not sure if the drivers are installed. Where would I go to find that out? I am using Gnome as my UI. If I don't have the drivers installed, where would I go? 
The ASUS site only gives me options to download for various Windows OS, DOS and "other" (in .ROM format). 
Which should I take and how should I install? I'm mostly looking for audio drivers. A lot of music I play, either on YouTube or with VLC has a faint crackling in the background on Ubuntu, which gets much worse the higher I turn the volume up. Could this be something other than the drivers? 
I doubt it's the hardware since the sound seems fine on Windows. I am currently running 12.04.

A:

There aren't generally any special motherboard chipset drivers that you need to install separately on Linux, like you need to do on Windows. The drivers are part of the Linux kernel. The hardware is detected at boot time and the correct drivers are loaded. 
There are however cases where one might acquire hardware that is newer than the version of the kernel in the Linux distribution you choose to install; or even do not yet have any or full functionality in the upstream kernel. 
In these cases though, you usually have to just wait or suffer, until the better drivers are available, as manufacturers typically don't offer additional drivers for Linux for these types of hardware. This is rarely an issue for motherboards though, as most of them use standard chipsets across the board, so are often covered by the drivers already available in the kernel. 
The Ubuntu Kernel Team are also pretty good about ensuring that newer drivers are backported into the current development version of Ubuntu, to ensure a broader range of compatibility for users.

