Checkbox-gtk test your hardware for know if it works correctly or not, it can be used for know existing hardware in the world, and have information for how to configure it more correctly.

It can be implemented with a DB with information from hardware tested, and information like launchpad for how to configure it better than default config.

With a lot of people trying have it better configuration for hardware, can be able to have a database that also can autoconfigure hardware with little scripts and Checkbox-gtk can propose to configure it if exists a better way to configure it.

It is quite common to hear people recommend the use of Ubuntu (and other GNU/Linux distros) on older computer hardware. The argument is that it is less resource intensive and will breath new life into the hardware. This is something that I've suggested to friends in the past.

But is this claim accurate? Is Ubuntu actually faster on older hardware?

Should people in the community be actively recommending that people with old computers running WinXP switch to Ubuntu? Net Applications states that WinXP has around 62% market share. I don't have an exact figure but I believe there are probably quite a few people in this group who have computers, that work perfectly fine, that will be unable to upgrade to Vista/Win7 (without upgrading hardware) because they do not meet the Vista system Reqs (800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, 32 MB Graphics memory) or the Win 7 system Reqs (1 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 128 MB Graphics memory, 16GB HDD free).

I've tried to find some research on this but have struggled. A friend actually pointed me to an article which suggested Ubuntu is getting slower. What is the truth?

We need a convenient way to keep track of the various hardware available.

A Launchpad Hardware Bug Tracker (HBT) would be a database where pieces of hardware -- e.g. soundcards, videocards, USB devices, even laptop models -- would have an entry. More-or-less like Launchpad today has a database of Ubuntu software packages. So, if I had a video card GF0674-AX from Acme. Inc., I should be able to find it in the database, and report bugs for that device.

These bugs would be natural places for people to look for help on their specific devices or laptops, and report their progress. The bugs would also be a great resource for developers working with hardware issues.

The HBT should be able to link bugs from LP & vice versa.

I believe such a HBT would be beneficial to all the projects on LP.

The hardware would need to be organized in various ways, so you could search and find what you are looking for.

There are various ways how we could deal with populating the database, obviously every device should only have one entry. Off the top of my head, one possibility is a collaboration with hardware manufacturers. Another that the information could be scraped by software run by users on their machines.

When we are envolved on hacklabs (which i reccomend, it is extremelly fun and constructive - people don't know what it is please see definitions at wikipedia and alike), recovering hardware considered old and obsolete, we always think on installing Linux on these machines.
And when we think about Linux, we almost think about Ubuntu, due on it's intensive community, and the useful and simple to use repository.

The problem is even Xubuntu is too heavy to install on some old hardware.

The choices we can find are PuppyLinux, DamnSmallLinux, TinyCore, TinyLinux, etc. - but the problem is it's extremelly hard to install these distributions on their hard disks, and using the Ubuntu repository from them instead.

This reason makes me think: would be interesting and possible existing some kind of Tinybuntu, a Ubuntu-based distro can be considered as light as PuppyLinux, DamnSmallLinux, TinyCore, TinyLinux, etc., and being as easy to install as Ubuntu and Xubuntu are, and being so easy to use the Ubuntu repository as well?

Thanks!

I was on IRC today when a user asked for help with a webcam problem. He had to compile the source code of his webcam drivers and when he tried he got the following error message:
http://pastebin.com/d6d04a18c

I posted a link because it's quite a long one. Now imagine you get a long error message that shows a bunch of numbers, your going to be pretty put off. It's a simple compilation error. All the person wants to do is install there webcam but because the driver installation isn't "user friendly" he's unable to without a fair bit of trouble.

My Idea? I know we have Getdeb.com which offers pre-compiled software for Ubuntu in the form of .deb files, but what if we had a similar site or section on getdeb.com which offered precompiled drivers for things like webcams, printers, etc? It would make life and Ubuntu much more enjoyable. There wouldn't be countless hours spent trying to get something as trivial as a webcam working.

Honestly, how many new Ubuntu users know how to compile a driver from source? Not many I bet. Imagine a user that didn't know how to use IRC or forums? That would be an even bigger problem for someone that was use to installing drivers through a simple installation wizard.

Anyhow that's my idea and this is my first step towards getting it implemented. I'm very willing to help get this started. If your interested let me know.

First of all apologize for my english.

I hope this idea be useful.

Using "lshw" everybody can find all the hardware present on the computer.
I was thinking about to create a new on "system->administration", for example, where all the present hardware were shown in a more easy way than "lshw".
At least it could be faster to detect problems with some hardware, unkown VGA for example, than "lshw"
I know that this would be a problem because a new entry on the menu means more memory usage while there is a good comman like "lshw", but this new feature could mean more usability once we are installing ubuntu on new machines/servers we don't know very well.

Thank you very much for reading this idea.

jockey-gtk is the proprietary-driver manager on Ubuntu. It lets the user choose wich drivers to use and what version.

It would be useful to manage open-source drivers as well.

If you are looking for some hardware support you look in google

My graphics hardware was added to the compiz hardware blacklist for the Intrepid release. Annoying asthis is I'm sure they had their reasons. Sadly though I had no idea about this until I 'upgraded' from Hardy and everything went bad without the possibility of undoing any of the changes.

Great.

Maybe the upgrade app could be made to check my (god damn!) hardware BEFORE 'upgrading' me.

In fact if ANY software blacklists ANY hardware should it not be standard practice to publish this info and have applications that do 'upgrading' check it first?

Roger.


PS.

To those smug people just dying to type 'you should have checked yourself before upgrading' really don't bother - my idea is to AUTOMATE SOMETHING THE COMPUTER CAN AND SHOULD DO FOR ME, not become a full time OS geek.

I feel that ubuntu should have an easier-to-use GUI manual hardware configuration, due to the fact that a number of hardware components are not correctly auto-detected by the automatic configuration wizard. It should be something like the opensuse configuration editor SaX.