A: No. Q: Should I include quotations after my reply? On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 07:25:49PM +0200, Robert M. Albrecht wrote: > Hi, > > Fedoras Mike McGrath has started Smolt. Smolt is included since Fedora 7 > and supports Ubuntu, Suse, ... > > Smolt collects hw-informations and sends them to a central server. This is > done once while installation and regulary while running the system. > > https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/smolt Yes, smolt has been out there for quite a while and is a nice try at doing something like this, but still fails for a database by which users can do a simple "does this device work with Linux" check while standing in a store. It is a nice tool to use by kernel developers to validate which drivers should be focused more on, so in that usage model, it has succeeded very nicely. > The idea was discussed to link this data to wiki-pages, so users can > contribute to a hw-database: drivers, howtos, status reports, ... Has that happened? > I think it has failed before, because the database would be large and needs > to be updated very often. But Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap shows, this is > possible. If every user does only contribute his two PCs, we could cover > all eixsting hardware. Mapping pci id to a physical device sitting in a box is an almost impossible task. Same goes for USB devices (are you going to be able to tell the difference between two different versions of a device properly?) I welcome the attempt, but still remain unconvinced that it will be possible. Please feel free to prove me wrong, it would not be the first time :) thanks, greg k-h
