RH recommends using Windows? plus a Question!

[Jef Spaleta]

Michael K. Johnson wrote:

> My basic concept is that there's a lot of information on the system
> that you can get at with tools like lspci and dmidecode.  Parse that
> into units of hardware and present the user a GUI that lets them
> make some easy assignments for how well things work (default is
> "don't know" in order to avoid garbage) with definitions for the
> levels, and places for comments for each piece of hardware.  Then
> this data is uploaded (signed with the user's gpg key?) in a
> structured, parseable format (xml?) to a centralized database that
> is both downloadable and web-searchable.

Hmm well lets see...what other things have a model like this...freedb.
Maybe there are lessons to be learned from freedb.

Some hard issues though for me...
Even if you do have people sign their specs with gpg...how do you really know
who's key's to trust. And how do you deal with conflicting reports. I'd imagine
certain popular off the shelf groups of hardware will have a lot of
reports...a lot of conflicting reports (depending on several factors of
the user's particular experience level). can't really limit this sort of
thing to a few trusted individuals..yer going to need a wide range of
people with a wide range of hardware for this to be useful.

And, how do you make sure the hardware database takes into account
specific hardware conflicts...not just broken hardware...but specific
issues with specific combinations of hardware.

Seems to me this sort of thing almost ends up being a specifically
tasked rework of bugzilla in a way....but with a mature way to cross
reference conflicting hardware reports that crop up. So that people can
do queries on a grouping of hardware so they can see if there are
specific incompatibilities when certain hardware is used together.
So maybe video card A works with motherboard 1 seamlessly...but not with
motherboard 2...having a way to query not just a piece of hardware and
see all known comments for it...but a way to query specific groupings of
hardware to narrow down relevant reports.

-jef"this monster is going to need a bit of care and feeding...maybe
even some sort of /. like moderation scheme to keep hardware comments
maintained"spaleta
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