The Fedora Hardware Project

[Maxwell Kanat-Alexander]

On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 19:23, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Storing brand names is a pain, as there will be 4000 branding variants
> of a particular device.

	I was hoping for people to use the pre-entered ones for their chipset
ID, mostly, and making it slightly difficult to enter a new one.

	I can see your point, there, though.

	The problem is: Users will want to search for brand names.

	Are there other resolutions to this issue?

	Perhaps there's a way to get a canonical sort of brand name out of DMI.

> Having a system card URL can lead to privacy concerns.

	I see the point, here. We'll have to give people the option to make
their system private or public, something like MadOnion.com (or whatever
it's called now) does with their 3DMark results and the related
hardware.

> One of the issues you'll have to deal with is only presenting
> to the user the 'interesting' hardware.

	From lspci, at least, we have a "hardware type", like "USB Controller."
We'd probably have to keep up, somewhat, on the hardware types, and make
sure that we filter what we ask the user about based on that.

>  In general, the user
> isn't going to be able to diagnose efficiently enough to the
> hardware tool whether or not their PCI bridge works. On the
> other end, when you deal with something like a hard drive, there
> are 4000 models, most all of which work exactly the same.

	I would hope that for things like disk drives, we could just run some
basic diagnostics and leave the user alone.


> hwbrowser just calls libkudzu; that data is easily available.

	Thanks.

	-M