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Online Repository for Hardware Configurations?
Great_Jehovah asks: "I've done a lot of trial-and-error and spent time researching getting various devices (e.g. motherboards, USB devices, DVD burners) working on Linux. I've also spent a bunch of time configuring different pieces of software for particular applications. I would like a nice centralized place to share these pieces of knowledge and also to see what others have done. I've looked on Google but either I can't conjure the right keywords, or this place just doesn't exist yet. Anyone know where such a site exists? If not, I'll start one."
Hmmm...How bout' LDP ?
RedHat has an HCL for their distro. I highly doubt much (if any) of it is RedHat specific. Kernel modules are kernel modules afterall, they care not the distro.
It's not entirely clear what you mean by "configuring different pieces of software for particular applications." Chances are good whatever you did was documented somewhere in the application's docs, forums, etc. Why not just use them as they were intended?
If you managed to combine all this data in one monolithic database I'm not sure I would use it. How can you keep it updated? Users only notify you of errors with stuff they use, the lesser known tweaks could sit broken for ages without you knowing. Above that, you would need some very slick search and navigation tools for this thing.
On the other hand, a distro-specific "best practices" guide would be very handy. One supported by the community and frequently updated. I have my own personal checklist of things to do after installing RH8, I bet if you and I combined lists we'd both benefit. Now multiply that by the number of cluefull RH8 users out there. You'd have a hell of a list but one hell of an OS when you were done.
You could try the Linux hardware database (URL escapes me), or you could post your write-ups on the Linux StepByStep site (www.linux-sxs.org) which is entirely about "how I did xx with Linux"...
take a look at Just Linux Hardware While it is fairly new, it is growing into quite a resource.
Plus, the revenue the site generates gets donated to open source projects and orginizations, which is also pretty cool
That Linux hardware database, IIRC, was hosted by a company that might have slipped under the waves with the fizzling of the dotcom boom.
But you have a really great idea.
Newbies and veterans alike would find it useful to know if some piece of hardware would work under a particular version of Linux.
Old hardware is important in cases where there isn't a lot of money to keep up with the latest hardware releases; schools, charities, and even businesses in the undeveloped world would benefit from such a knowledge base.
Also, if there were some means of making a spam-free 2-way communications channel from the site hosting the hardware db, it might be useful to kernel developers who want to know if their patch might cause a bad interaction in some corner case of two or three unusual old pieces of hardware that they don't have access to. They could send email to the owner of the machine with the configuration they want to test against asking how their patch affected the system.
Your idea would really blossom [I'm sure something like this must already exist at Red Hat, SuSE and other big Linux outfits, OSDL perhaps, despite their enterprise focus?] if someone were to setup a network of deliberately heterogeneous machines, chosen for their diversity, a zoo, with the ability to bring up and test out different kernels, configuration parameters, and end user applications. The kind of machines that would go into this zoo would mostly be inexpensive, too.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The Linux Hardware Database, which was at one time on http://lhd.datapower.net, then moved to http://lhd.zdnet.com, has, unfortunately gone by the wayside. It was an amazing project, and I personally would love to see another like it.
Glen
Track your fuel economy
Mod parent up.
That is a good idea, and something that I would find very usefull. I find it annoying that everytime I want to setup some common service on my linux box, I have to wade through a huge HOWTO and read a some articles online, when I could simply modify a simple code snippet.
Does such a repository of snippets exist anywhere?
Last week I had to pull from the closet and old IBM-8514 monitor because I sold my Viewsonic and my AcerView crap out and died with a *BZZZT* and smoke.
Last time I used the 8514 it took me 2 days to configure X for the 1024x768 87Hz Interlaced mode. as you would imagine, there are no docs for this monitor on the web (or IBM site) and i had to try ModeLine after Modeline until i got ona that kina worked and then spent a cuuple of hours tunning it.
So, YES it would be nice, especialiy now that i'm back to 640x480 because I don't know where my copy of that old XF86Config file is.
My firewall/router uses an old P120 cpu and motherboard and at the moment (as it is about 100F here in Hungary) the CPU is overheating. It took me a lot of experimenting with jumper settings before I found out how to underclock it. As the board is an antique there is no documentation.
Go for it !!
Ed Almos
try google
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The Linux Hardware Database doesn't exist anymore - it used to be owned by ZDNET, but they nuked the whole site a while ago. I sent in an e-mail to the tech department and requested that they ressurect the site, but there has been no action. The site is for the most part dead.
...I bet that'll "*BZZZT* and smoke" soon too.
(happened to me 2 yrs ago, near enough same situation. It took 2 weeks to do it, so watch it).
-- Mod me down. I am not a karma tart. ffs,gag
First, there's the signal-to-noise ratio, which can get pretty awful even in fora designed originally to support just one piece of software or one piece of functionality. See for instance the number of different lists you need to hunt down just to get started diagnosing a problem with subsytems involving components from different sources. eg getting the TV functionality on a Radeon All-in-Wonder to work with your distro's patched-up kernel, the v4l2-bttv kernel modules, the various gatos kernel modules, XF86 modules and associated bits, and a couple of viewers like xawtv and avview. Which still don't work for me. Unsurprisingly.
Then there's the poor internal structure of the lists themselves. Most posters seeking help don't bother to supply a meaningful and apposite subject line since they are only thinking about getting an answer to their problem today rather than documenting their painful journey for the benefit of future travellers. This tends to render the list's thread view into more or less random nonsense.
And then, many forum host providers only provide search capability at the subject line level, so poor (or confused) subject line relevance forces you to google for the information just in that one list as from a great distance. And even the mighty Google can swamp any good matches in a sea of distraction, because even Google doesn't support (AFAIK) search target restriction modifiers at any smaller granularity than per host.
The result of these deficiencies is that you can search for days, weeks even, without coming across an unambiguously documented example of the problem you are looking for - even when it is inevitable that someone somewhere *must* have suffered the same problem. If it's a complex problem and if you do manage to find a documented example, it's odds on that the question will have been left dangling with not so much as an acknowledgement from anyone. Or, there will be some "red herring" reply spawning a substantial thread of only barely tangential relevance.
To maximize our leverage of all the previous problem-solving that has been done by ordinary half-able users like you and me, we need to make it nice and easy for people to document their questions and answers in a more structured, accessible and re-usable way. Yes, there should be a single repository, centralized in the sense that if it succeeds (a la freshmeat and sourceforge), alternatives would be irrelevant and possibly even counterproductive; but not necessarily centralized in the sense of control. Rather it might be distributed in terms of implementation and maintainance (cf wikipedia or bugzilla as opposed to freshmeat or "ask slashdot").
The key concept to the creation of something an orders of magnitude more useful than the current generation of help sources is the use of structured data for indexing, categorization and traversal rather than hit-and-miss indexing of freeform text by search bots. Users need to be able to search precisely for documented Q&A on previous instances of whatever specific and arcane combinations of circumstance have led to their own predicament. To this end, submissions need to be carefully tagged with a full compliment of relevant keywords and perhaps even the semantic relationships between them, and those keywords and relations may need to be amended again whenever somebody manages to add another piece to the puzzle.
I envisage a submission procedure driven by a continually evolving and diversifying system of nested questionnaires with the intention of:
I registered thismachine.org a while ago, for a project that I accept I'll never actually get around to. Seems like it'd be pretty appropriate: can I get this machine to work? Go to thismachine.org...
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
I've had this thought before, I've been inspired after many hours trying to get my Whatcha-callit-device's to work under Linux.
.gz/.deb/.rpm. The script would create the necessary dependencies for packages, then edit the package's config files (this is the hard bit). A developer/hacker could easily download a skeleton script or base their scirpt on a similar one. Then they would edit the script with the necessary commands and upload it again.
Let me describe my idea using my notebook PC. It's an old Toshiba Pentium 133. I found a website that nicely walks my way through the installation, it was great. However, the instructions were for seting up SuSe, I had Debian. So there were a few small descrepencies on how to set up Linux.
It would be nice to have a deb/rpm that installs all the complimentary packages and edits the config files. For any notebook it would be very straight forward, one model will have many devices to set up, but one simple package could do it.
This could be done by using a universal script that can be translated into a
Psi
Auld Monitors: Monitor World
PCI Vendor and Device lists
( maybe you can get Knoppix to tell you, with "lspci", what a device is, for the previous one...
Many know of Adrian's Rojak Pot BIOS guide, sometimes useful for weird BIOS 'features' like the older "Format HD" that doesn't tell you this is for old RLL drives... even though no ESDI/RLL drives were sold in the year the mobo was made... (ouch)
I bookmarked, but haven't bothered with yet, HardwareSecrets.com, maybe it's got the stuff youse want...
-sigh- I USED to have a link to a (Russian?) site that listed all sorts of old drives' jumpers ( not the clothing ), dunno what happened to that one...
If you find more such gems, add 'em, eh?
Cheers,
Messages to/for me ( in me journal )