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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."
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
No, no, no. This is a GREAT idea - think about it like "C Code Snippets" for Linux configuration files. Here are a few examples:
Case #1
I need a config file for Samba to emulate an NT4 PDC. I download the prewritten boilerplate config file, change the domain name, put it in
Case #2
Or how about a config file for Sendmail that uses Spam Assassin for spam filtering and renattach for viruses.
Case #3
I want to turn my old 386 into a Linksys-style NAT box. The only imbound port I need mapped is my web server (port 80). You got config files for that?
Case #4
Shared email address books with LDAP. I want to run an LDAP server with slapd to provide shared email address books, but I don't want to use LDAP for any sort of network authentication. I just want users to be able to create folders and contacts and move the contacts around in the folders (and add, change, delete and update them, of course.) Apparently, I'm the only person that ever thought of doing this because I haven't found ANY docs anywhere that describe this sort of thing.
Your target audience here is beginners and administrators who are migrating to Linux services who want to get things working without having to read and decode **ALL** of the documentation up front.
Let's face it, with if you take any given piece of software,there really are only a few different basic configs most people want to start out with, and once you get basic functionality in place, you can tweak to customize from there. Hey, they did it with sendmail, right?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
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.
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This is *exactly* the goal of the Linux StepbyStep site. Check out www.linux-sxs.org