Slashdot Mirror
Linux Hardware Detection Project
jesus writes "The crazy kiddies over at Linux Mandrake have started the Lothar Project . The goal is to make hardware detection and configuration easy. The code is in CVS and they need all sorts of different people and furry animals, so take a gander at the page, look at the pretty screenshots, and contribute to world domination. "
Leatos seems a bit odd as the naming suggests that it is a new OS, not a distribution, but that may be sound marketing for the French market. Still, the code is GPL, so more power to them.
LinuxGT have picked their own logo, and when it was last up the website had now infor about license or source code, but I imagine they will get round to that.
Rather than everyone creating easy-install distributions, it would be nice to see more distribution-independent tools, like linuxconf.
Check out http://www.cyclic.com/. Basically it's a group project management system. Everyone downloads a copy of the source via 'cvs checkout'..
People can commit new changes to the source tree via 'cvs commit'...
You can get a diff between your source tree and the one at the repository via 'cvs diff'...
You can update the current directory you are in via 'cvs update'.
Basic commands to checkout source are:
export CVSROOT=:pserver:user@host/directory
cvs login
[enter password]
cvs -z3 checkout tree-you-want-to-checkout
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
hey..what window manager/theme are those screenshots runnin? /me *really* likes the looks of that. :)
-----
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...
Mandrake's original draw was the whole KDE+Red Hat thing, which appealed to a lot of people back when Red Hat refused to touch K. I expect that the existence of Mandrake helped push Red Hat to include KDE in RH 6.
Now that an "alternative" Red Hat that includes KDE isn't needed anymore, though, I was wondering what Mandrake would do with themselves. Well, apparently they've found a very worthy case to pursue. Even if this project doesn't suceed (and I hope that it does), it will pressure Red Hat to improve *their* hardware configuration support, just to stay up with the "competition".
I see this cycle continuing: Red Hat overlooks something that the users want, so people put together a "better" Red Hat that addresses these issues. In order not to lose users, Red Hat realizes that it must develop these features for it's release. And most will happily stay with Red Hat as a result.
This is all As It Should Be, as far as I am concerned.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
This is one of those projects that should and will stand out in the community. This a required step in Linux's continued expansion. I applaud the effort of the folks over at madrake. A few suggested considerations (which have most likely alrady been considered, but would enjoy hearing thoughts on them):
LDAP?
Linuxconf tie-ins?
Great work guys!
*Flame shield on*
Why make the statement about 'contributing to world domination', when this makes you sound terribly like Microsoft? I really don't understand how one can be against a certain train of thought, yet pronounce the same desire...
No matter how much I wish to see everyone putting the right OS in the right solution, there are still comments like this. When will people realise that the world needs more than one OS?
*Flame shield off*
Besides that, I can't wait to see better PnP in Linux...especially with the amount of PCI / USB devices that are reliant on this. PnP would boost even more interest in Linux in more situations, all that's needed then is a little more help from hardware makers.
It's a pretty decent idea, except that U tend to run into ordinary people.
They combine h/w and components to defeat most programmers. Plus, put s/w thru torture tests that cant be imagined.
Finally, what about the idiot factor? The old line about the struggle between software trying to outsmart the biggest idiot and all that...
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!