[Kde-hardware-devel] KDE (Linux hardware) issues

[Christopher Blauvelt]

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.
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.
I don't really understand what you're getting at in your third point.
Transferring hard drives to another system?
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.
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.
Well that's what I think.  Feel free to disagree.
Chris



On 1/8/06, Alexander Antoniades <sanderant at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all, you asked for input so I thought I'd put in my 0.02$ as requested
> on
> the announcement. I'd just like to put out a couple of ideas/questions on
> the
> offhand chance you haven't thought of them (doubtful, but you never know).
> :)
>
> 1) The biggest problem with most of the hardware interaction issues with
> Linux
> is that projects like HAL Device Manager is that they offer information,
> but
> no way to rectify the problem. I know that Hal Device Manager was made
> that
> way by design, but this makes it relatively useless, so the first issue is
> I
> hope any type of device manager style applications provide a way to
> actually
> change or rectify hardware problems as opposed to simply stating what the
> system sees.
> From my experience having to deal with that OS that runs on 90% of the
> worlds
> computers everyday, the main use of a device manager style application is
> to
> see if the OS sees the right hardware and to sometimes change drivers in
> the
> case of mis-identification, or drop to a generic driver in the case of a
> driver not working correctly.
> This is my main shortcoming with Linux these days and would go a long way
> to
> help those of us who try to evangelize and expand Linux's base.
>
> 2) What about integration with any existing projects? In particular I was
> thinking about Ubuntu's hardware database and YaST. I know YaST is a whole
> backend, but components like SAX2 are GPL and seem like they would go a
> long
> way towards making X (which I assume would be a necessary prerequisite to
> KDE
> on all platforms) easier to manage.
>
> 3) One more wish (which isn't done by any OS I know of) would be the
> ability
> to show all the drivers the currently installed KDE system. This would
> help
> for in the event of moving the hard drive to another system or switching
> out
> hardware the ability to anticipate the difficulty of any change or when
> making upgrade decisions.
>
> 4) Lastly, for those of us that don't have programming skills, but have
> access
> to a wide array of hardware I would suggest you plan on releasing live CDs
> to
> help us assist in any hardware information gathering as I'm sure you'll
> get
> as much information as you can handle that way.
>
> I realize these are generally pretty obvious, but I wanted to make sure I
> offered them up for you since the project is just starting.
>
> Thank you for addressing this weakness in KDE and I look forward to your
> progress!
>
> Sander
> _______________________________________________
> Kde-hardware-devel mailing list
> Kde-hardware-devel at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-hardware-devel
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-hardware-devel/attachments/20060108/cadede79/attachment.html