• Diff for "Hardware/Database"

This page provides info about new automated hardware database, how to use it and how to add your hardware to the database.

The project is the successor of the Smolt project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolt_(Linux)

About

Nowadays, Linux hardware compatibility is almost perfect compared to the 90s. However, according to the latest report from https://Linux-Hardware.org about 20% of Linux users still facing hardware compatibility problems. Most of them (79%) have only one unsupported device on board, some of them (18%) have two unsupported devices, the minor part of them (2%) have three unsupported devices and the rest (1%) have 4-7 unsupported devices.

The new hardware database is introduced to automatically collect detailed hardware info, collect all necessary hardware related system logs as well for effective debugging, check operability of devices by automated static analysis of collected logs and provide perfect navigation capabilities. Collected logs are depersonalized at the client side.

It's important to have non-Debian probes in the database to be able to look at the experience of other Linux distributions (like Ubuntu) when debugging some computer model or particular hardware parts, so Debian database is just a part of the global database including all Linux distributions: https://linux-hardware.org/?d=Debian

The database is dumped to the Github repository https://github.com/linuxhw/ for statistical analysis by third parties and to protect against data loss in the future.

The database is closely integrated with LKDDb (https://cateee.net/lkddb/) to immediately suggest a proper (newer) Linux kernel versions for unsupported devices.

Install client

Choose most appropriate way to install:

1. Deb package:

wget https://github.com/linuxhw/hw-probe/releases/download/1.4/hw-probe_1.4-2_all.deb
sudo apt-get update
sudo dpkg -i ./hw-probe_1.4-2_all.deb
sudo apt install -f --no-install-recommends

2. Universal packages:

• 2.1. Appimage (https://github.com/linuxhw/hw-probe#appimage)

  2.2. Docker (https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxhw/hw-probe/)

  2.3. Snap (https://snapcraft.io/hw-probe)

  2.4. Flatpak (https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.linux_hardware.hw-probe)

Usage

Submit your hardware:

sudo hw-probe -all -upload

Sample output:

Probe for hardware ... Ok
Reading logs ... Ok
Uploaded to DB, Thank you!
Probe URL: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=6b964cd335

Privacy

Private info is not collected. See privacy notes: https://github.com/linuxhw/hw-probe#privacy

Moreover, it's safer to share your logs by hw-probe rather than share manually, because all private strings are decorated at the client side before uploading.

CategoryHardware