Helping a newbie list or troubleshoot their hardware

[Sy Ali]

On 5/19/07, Colin McGregor <colinmc151-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Standard Linux tools are available under Knoppix for
> hardware listing/checking are available under Knoppix
> (ie: hwinfo, lspci, etc...)

It's this list that I'm after.  =)

Plus, non-Linux tools would be as or more helpful, since most users
would be coming from Windows (or Macs?).


> In other words as a quick and dirty it will / will not
> test of hardware, Knoppix is a great choice...

PCLinuxOS is equal or better, which is what I'm writing this bit of
documentation for.  I bumped into some hardware-related stuff which
does a great job of summarizing.

But I don't ever want to see this:

Do a lot of reading and "get sold on this Linux thing"
Go through several distributions, trying to figure out what's
different between them
Go through the hell of trying to download an ISO, maybe multiple times
Figure out how to do this md5sum stuff - why doesn't my download "just work"?
Figure out how to burn a CD.  Oops, I burned a few coasters while
trying - burned the ISO as a file, mis-burned by burning at a high
speed, etc.
Boot from the CD
Wait
Wait
...
Get lots of errors that I don't understand
be totally unable to troubleshoot even the most simple problems.
maybe go through the trouble of re-downloading and re-burning.
Get frustrated at this "Linux thing"
give up
tell all my friends that Linux sucks
kill all my Linux friends and feed them to their parents
frown at a kitten

So if a person were able to figure out their hardware without so much
trouble it would help.  A smaller specialized distro could be ok, but
maybe what I'm really after is Windows software and various distro and
general Linux hardware databases - I know of a few which are fair, but
they don't seem to trade information nor do they act as real databases
with an API to update software similar to virus scanners and the virus
database.

Some kind of program which not only checked and reported on my
hardware but could tell me things like "most people use closed-source
drivers for your video card" or "your laptop has issues with
suspending" would be a dream.  =/

Imagine if everyone reported their hardware as easily as contributing
to the open CDDB.


So I guess for now I'd hunt for windows software which does decent
information-gathering.  Preferably open source.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists