<div>It seems that the first priority of solid should be informational. The device manager that you're describing would be better suited as a "helper application." Or a front end that is capable of accessing the knowledge base and downloading and/or compiling drivers as needed. This would be in keeping with the tried and true *nix mantra of do one thing really well. A device manager would be an appropriate application to be released with kde4. It all depends on how ambitious we're willing to be.
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<div>I believe your second point is very valid. Mostly as a courtesy to the user more or less to update that system so it knows what's installed and what isn't. This again would be a priority of the device manager application.
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<div>I don't really understand what you're getting at in your third point. Transferring hard drives to another system?</div>
<div>A live CD needs to be a future goal of the project. I, however, see a very limited use for it. Most of what the knowledge base is all about is what driver combination to use to get a device working "as advertised." That takes trial and error and usually some google'ing. Most of my time spend getting devices to work is not spent coding. In fact, I don't believe my coding knowledge really helps me at all.
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<div>Judging by the pace of previous KDE system development I feel that having narrowly focused goals and sticking to them will make the biggest contribution to KDE and foster the greatest amount of adoption.</div>
<div>Well that's what I think. Feel free to disagree.</div>
<div>Chris<br> </div><br><br>
<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 1/8/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Alexander Antoniades</b> <<a href="mailto:sanderant@gmail.com">sanderant@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">Hi all, you asked for input so I thought I'd put in my 0.02$ as requested on<br>the announcement. I'd just like to put out a couple of ideas/questions on the
<br>offhand chance you haven't thought of them (doubtful, but you never know). :)<br><br>1) The biggest problem with most of the hardware interaction issues with Linux<br>is that projects like HAL Device Manager is that they offer information, but
<br>no way to rectify the problem. I know that Hal Device Manager was made that<br>way by design, but this makes it relatively useless, so the first issue is I<br>hope any type of device manager style applications provide a way to actually
<br>change or rectify hardware problems as opposed to simply stating what the<br>system sees.<br>From my experience having to deal with that OS that runs on 90% of the worlds<br>computers everyday, the main use of a device manager style application is to
<br>see if the OS sees the right hardware and to sometimes change drivers in the<br>case of mis-identification, or drop to a generic driver in the case of a<br>driver not working correctly.<br>This is my main shortcoming with Linux these days and would go a long way to
<br>help those of us who try to evangelize and expand Linux's base.<br><br>2) What about integration with any existing projects? In particular I was<br>thinking about Ubuntu's hardware database and YaST. I know YaST is a whole
<br>backend, but components like SAX2 are GPL and seem like they would go a long<br>way towards making X (which I assume would be a necessary prerequisite to KDE<br>on all platforms) easier to manage.<br><br>3) One more wish (which isn't done by any OS I know of) would be the ability
<br>to show all the drivers the currently installed KDE system. This would help<br>for in the event of moving the hard drive to another system or switching out<br>hardware the ability to anticipate the difficulty of any change or when
<br>making upgrade decisions.<br><br>4) Lastly, for those of us that don't have programming skills, but have access<br>to a wide array of hardware I would suggest you plan on releasing live CDs to<br>help us assist in any hardware information gathering as I'm sure you'll get
<br>as much information as you can handle that way.<br><br>I realize these are generally pretty obvious, but I wanted to make sure I<br>offered them up for you since the project is just starting.<br><br>Thank you for addressing this weakness in KDE and I look forward to your
<br>progress!<br><br>Sander<br>_______________________________________________<br>Kde-hardware-devel mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Kde-hardware-devel@kde.org">Kde-hardware-devel@kde.org</a><br><a href="https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-hardware-devel">
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-hardware-devel</a><br></blockquote></div><br>