Hardware Database (WAS Re: RH recommends using Windows? plus a Question!)

[Maxwell Kanat-Alexander]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 23:37, Warren Togami wrote:
> This is also a clear case for XMLRPC-like communication between client
> and server.

	That makes sense.

> Ultimately all of this and other data should be converted into XML and
> communicated over the Internet.  The pygtk applications on the client
> side displays human readable information based upon a lookup table from
> this data.

	Agreed. Is there a pre-existing source of data that we could use for
that lookup table?

> I hope this applet would not be within the default Gnome/KDE profile,
> because then it would pop up on the user desktop of all users at least
> once.  This is not ideal for massive multi-user systems like LTSP.

	I would think that it would only come up once, system-wide.

> I believe this may be ideal for firstboot, and also choosable from the
> System menu.  Perhaps there are better ideas...

	We discussed having it on firstboot. Here's the pros and cons:

	Pro: Doesn't clutter up user space after firstboot.
	Pro: Easy to draw users' attention

	Con: I heard a "nobody likes firstboot already" that may or may not be
true.
	Con: It's hard to determine whether or not hardware works on the first
boot.

	The only real problem is the last one. I think it would be great to get
the data on firstboot, and then we could have a lot of "No Problems
Reported" on a lot of hardware.
	What are our options then for getting further data about what hardware
works and what doesn't?

	Here's the info we can get at firstboot:

	(1) What hardware the user has.
	(2) Do we have drivers for it?
	(3) Some simple diagnostics, maybe.

	Perhaps we can just leave it up to more advanced users to report when
they have hardware problems, and leave it to the more basic users to
just search the advanced users' reports. That is, we'd have a "Submit
Hardware Information" in the System Tools.

	-M