[Rule] About SlinkyDetect, was: Installation Template

[C David Rigby]

Automatic hardware detection has advanced quite a bit since the
underlying detect library used for slinky detect was created. I did a
bit of research/reading on the subject over the last week or so. I
turned up three sites that discuss this issue at an intermediate
level:

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/hardware-detection.html

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Hardware_configuration

http://wiki.debian.org/?HardwareAutodetection

I'll dig a bit deeper in preparation for a hardware identification &
configuration article. I like the idea of a tool that can be run
against a room full of equipment and provide an automatic, electronic
"inventory report." That sounds like a highly useful project in its
own right, though a bit beyond what I could manage myself at this
point.

CDR

On 3/28/06, Marco Fioretti <mfioretti at mclink.it> wrote:
> David Rigby wrote:
>
> > Slinky Detect detects & reports on CPU, chipset, RAM, hard disk,
> > other IDE-attached devices, and PCI devices. It does not see ISA devices
> > or SCSI-attached and PCMCIA-attached devices, at least not that
> > I have been able to determine. As well its output seems, maybe, to be
> > a bit cryptic for the less technically savvy members of the potential
> > audience.
>
> I shall confess that I have never used slinkydetect personally. However,
> the main reason why it was born, and its only use case I've heard of so far,
> is not to be used once by the PC owner for his/her personal needs.
> Slinkydetect is (mainly) for gathering data always formatted in the same way,
> to build databases of lots of donated hardware: coordinator hands out one
> floppy to volunteers, they all go gathering old PCs, they never
> ever look at Slinkydetect output. They're just told: boot every
> PC you touch with this floppy, when it's full give it back to me.
> Then the coordinator writes, once, some online database that everybody
> can read via browser to know if there are X machines left for
> school so-and-so.
>
> Said this, your idea is excellent because it does cover the *other*
> use cases: single user looking to resurrect his home PC and so on.
>
> > So, that leads to the next proposed article topic,
> > which is an article concerning hardware identification. Besides using
> > Slinky Detect, other techniques (using Windows to identify hardware,
> > web searches, etc.) can be discussed in detail separately.
>
> Ciao,
> Marco
>
>
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