Thanks for the feedback. We're planning some major improvements for the LQ HCL in the near future. Please feel free to use this thread as a place to post feature requests and suggestions.

--jeremy

Hey jeremy, really great you could be here ..

Is an automatic report system for the LQ HCL a closed option? Or will we see that in near future? Maybe you should make it a seperate site if it goes so far, it is very advanced as it is, which is great. Make people come to this place, and then they will know where to find help in their journey changing from their old OS.

I would like to see some guide to find the product that a user is looking for, that could be a small guide with radio buttons, forms etc.

First you should choose the device, then what features it should have (For example dual-tuner, for video capture cards), if it should be fully supported by the vanilla kernel, or if it is ok with a third-part or somewhat workaround driver. And then you should be able to buy the product as well, maybe do some sponsor deals with a hardware retailer. You could probably earn a profit from them, plus they will eventually focus on linux compatible hardware if the demand is promising.

If a driver is not working with the vanilla kernel, the user submitting the entry should clearly link to the source where the driver and documentation/howto is available (rules for the hcl usage), and or write a howto himself. Unsupported, but popular hardware, should be automatically turned in to a petition to the hardware manufacturer requesting open-source drivers for the piece of hardware.

Hardware should be detected by ID, and the submit form should automatically suggest similar hardware from the HCL searching similar names (Is this your hardware?) to minimize duplicate entry's.

You should be able to quickly identify supported, feature-rich hardware, with an icon or color assigned to the most out-of-box modern hardware, in extension of the current "Products", "Views", "Rating", "Date", "Reviews" table. And all of this hardware should always be listed first.

Still, hardware shouldn't be categorized into manufacturers in my opinion, that is optional, first thing is that it's easy to find hardware supported.

The rating should be calculated from a form, not by user judgement.. This is done to maximize the accuracy of the HCL. This form can have questions such as "Did this hardware work out-of-box after you installed your distribution, just by plugging it into USB?", "Is the driver a part of the current kernel? (_$KERNELVER)", "Did you install any third-part or proprietary driver?", "Did you have to edit some files manually after installation of the driver?".. All these will be calculated into a rating telling if this hardware is actually truly supported.

We actually had part of an automatic system written a couple years back, so the option is certainly on the table. There are some issue that would need to be worked through, but nothing that should be insurmountable.

NOTE: I've moved this discussion to a dedicated thread.

--jeremy

Easier way to add things! Easier indexing! Better look to it (not just colours); right now it's alright, but can't we have the ability to further sort things out (ex: motherboards --> Asus --> AM2)? And change the URLs? (so it'd be like /hcl/asus/am2/m2n-e/ for example)

Another thing: More information on which kernels are needed to handle which hardware, like, you need a kernel 2.6.10+ for a N430-based motherboard, or a 2.6.22 to use Avivo, etc. I mean, it's nice that the 2.6.17 kernel can handle the hardware I'm interested in, but what about the 2.6.15 or lower? And if it's not built in can I add drivers?

One thing though: Thanks for the HCL Jeremy. It's not perfect, but it does the job and has helped me a lot before.

I think there should be links to guides to installing drivers on the main distributions(Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu etc.) so that it is easier to install hardware that require drivers to be downloaded and installed from a website

A nice feature would be to Search by device interface.. if I'm looking for a Modem or Wifi card for my laptop and I need a PCMCIA card.. it would be nice to filter HCL entries by that criteria.

Like some pull down filter boxes

Device type (modem/Wifi/serialports/SATA/Hardware RAID/Fake RAID etc.. )

Interface (pci/agp/pci-x/pci-express/mini-pci/PCMCIA)


Would take some work to sort out the best way to organize it, but it's a thought.

Hello,


Following the general interest of the GNU/Linux community, PLEASE, PLEASE make some effort to integrate these three projects, which have very similar goals:

http://hardware4linux.info/
https://fedorahosted.org/smolt/wiki
http://counter.li.org/

Making the hardware profiler as automatic as possible will greatly expand its adoption, filling a critical gap: collecting as much hardware details as possible and ease writing 100% free drivers.

All GNU/Linux users would benefit from such integration, no matter what distribution they use. Splitting efforts and resources based on distribution "religious wars" only serves one commercial interest: proprietary software, Microsoft & Co.

Here's a link to a bug in Fedora's bugzilla, related to this integration matter:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=433105


Best regards,
Răzvan

What does "The Linux Counter" have to do w/ an HCL; AFAIK, it just collects statistics? Am I missing something?

You failed to mention that the bug report you linked to is your own; now I need to ask: does your your post refer to integrating solely the 3 mentioned projects, or are you suggesting that the LQ HCL try to integrate w/ them also?


&, if you're mentioning similar projects, what about the HCL @ TLDP?

I'd like to second farslayer's suggestion. Some ways to sort through the hardware by device type and/or interface would be very helpful. Particularly if there was a way to add a Linux driver available option to the whole thing.

One of the things I've seen on commercial sites like Newegg that I like is once you get into a broad category, there is usually a series of narrower options on one side of the screen that allow you to drill down to fewer choices.