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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 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.
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:
This is *exactly* the goal of the Linux StepbyStep site. Check out www.linux-sxs.org