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Old 02-05-2004, 11:24 AM   #1
h3rb1
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Registered: Jan 2004
Location: New York City
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Lightbulb Suggestion: Uploading product images and manuals to the HCL.


Hello,

I just contributed to the Hardware Compatability List (2/2/2004), by adding my Gigabyte GA-BX2000 Motherboard. I will be adding more hardware to the list soon, but I was thinking if it is possible, to add the option to upload a picture of the hardware, and most importantly the actual manual.

It seems to me, that it's becoming very difficult to obtain any type of "official" information about a piece of hardware from a manufacturer, especially if the product has been discontinued, or the company is no longer in business.

It will be good to have the manuals for both reference, and historical reasons. Most hardware companies include the user's and operating manual in PDF with their driver's CDROM (I have many), and it won't be difficult to upload. After the manual is uploaded, it is reviewed (to make sure it matches the hardware contributed) and then placed on the server to be downloaded (maybe compressed, to save bandwidth).

For pictures, I think it will benefit new users to identify hardware that is already installed in their systems (without taking everything apart), and it will help them again, if they want to purchase hardware that is compatible, or avoid hardware that is not.

Thank you.


P.S. This is the first thread I started!
 
Old 02-05-2004, 01:19 PM   #2
finegan
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Registered: Aug 2001
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Distribution: Slackware
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These are all good ideas, but just not reasonable for cost concerns. The bandwidth involved in image hosting gets obsurd when you start talking about the kind of traffic LQ gets, even those little buttons here and there on the page are a bit taxing on the image server from what Jeremy mentions.

Manuals get a little uglier, reproduction of even a freely distributed work such as a motherboard manual could very easy fall afoul of copyright law. The size of these manuals is also a bit of a concern. This comes up more then you would think. Open Source driver writers sometimes have to direct you to download firmware from a manufacturer's site and then extract that and in turn use that with their code... the firmware is copyrighted, and even though its being given away one place, you can't necessarily give it away yourself.

The other major reason is that manuals are sometimes wrong. I've never actually seen this be the case very often, but all of the information for say, a motherboard, can be reached from:

/sbin/lspci

That'll tell me the southbridge, northbridge, IDE controller, onboard sound, video, NIC, etc, and revision numbers for each that would tell you more about the hardware then a picture or a manual. For instance, a Linksys LNE100, a staple among network cards, two months later may look entirely different. Linksys farms out the manufacturing of putting a certain chipset on a board, who they go with one year may be far different then the next, the model number doesn't change, the hardware itself doesn't change, but the board layout can be entirely different.

lspci, lsusb, a scsi channel scan, dmesg, cardctl ident, between these commands you can figure out anything you've got onboard, and you know for certain that's what you have.

Okay, not for old ISA devices, but that headache'll go away entirely as time wears on.

Please, add more to the HCL, we need the reviews, the feedback, all the information you're willing to give.

Cheers,

Finegan
 
Old 02-05-2004, 01:41 PM   #3
MasterC
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Registered: Mar 2002
Location: Salt Lake City, UT - USA
Distribution: Gentoo ; LFS ; Kubuntu ; CentOS ; Raspbian
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This brings up something I have been sort of thinking about (and at quick glance, didn't see):
Could we add a sort of "LinuxAnswer" on adding products into the HCL? A standard example that will encompass **most** of the categories, the type of information to include, and of course, the type of information to disclude; ways to obtain information about a device (above you mention many of these, such as lspci) and maybe even how to read that information (from time to time it looks like it's just random characters spit out at the untrained eye)?

Cool
 
Old 02-05-2004, 01:43 PM   #4
jeremy
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fin was kind enough to do this:
Guide to Linuxquestions HCL entries - http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ticle&artid=72

--jeremy
 
Old 02-10-2004, 08:17 PM   #5
h3rb1
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Registered: Jan 2004
Location: New York City
Posts: 62

Original Poster
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Quote:
Originally posted by finegan:
The bandwidth involved in image hosting gets obsurd when you start talking about the kind of traffic LQ gets, ...
Sorry, I was not aware of this fact.

Quote:
Originally posted by finegan:
Manuals get a little uglier, reproduction of even a freely distributed work such as a motherboard manual could very easy fall afoul of copyright law....
Yes you are correct, copyright can be a very big problem. I certainly wouldn't want LQ to get in trouble.

Thank you very much for your prompt reply and clarification.
 
  


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