Generally it depends on many things, but I'll sum them up to 2 ways:
- Through a repository: In this case the driver needed is available as a package already compiled in your distribution. Using the package manager (apt-get, yum, pacman, ...) you may install the needed one(s). E.g.
apt-get install package_name
would do in Debian based distributions. - The other way is downloading the sources and compiling them yourself. As it is a driver you'll need a development package for your kernel as Ignacio noted (you may get it using the repositories). Once that is installed, the most general way to install things in Linux usually involves running 3 commands in the directory the sources for the driver (in this case) are:
./configure
,make
, andmake install
. The last one is generally called with superuser privileges (either directly from theroot
account or throughsudo
,gksu
or something similar).