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This page provides info about a 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.

Contents

  1. About
  2. Privacy
  3. Install client
  4. Add your hardware
  5. Related links

About

Nowadays, Linux hardware compatibility has improved since the 90s, but some Linux users are still facing hardware compatibility problems.

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, find drivers for unsupported devices and provide perfect navigation capabilities. Collected logs are de-personalized 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 the Debian database is a part of the global database including all Linux distributions.

The database is dumped to the GitHub repository for statistical analysis by third parties and to protect against data loss in the future.

Monthly usage statistical reports are published on this page. The all-time stats for latest Debian release are published at salsa.debian.org.

The database is closely integrated with LKDDb to immediately suggest a proper (newer) Linux kernel versions for unsupported devices.

Privacy

Most private info is not collected or hashed. See the privacy notes.

/!\ Please note that a 32-byte prefix of salted SHA512 hashes of MAC addresses and serial numbers are uploaded to the server in order to properly identify unique computers and parts. These are unlikely to be reversible.

Moreover, it's safer to share your logs by hw-probe rather than share manually, because most private data is removed or hashed at the client side before uploading.

Install client

Choose most appropriate way to install: Debian in bullseye and later, Appimage, Docker or Flatpak — for older Debian releases.

The Debian package can also be installed in older Debian releases from Debian bullseye repository by following these steps: 

sudo apt install debian-archive-keyring
sudo sh -c 'echo deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-bullseye.list'
sudo apt update
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends hw-probe
sudo rm --force /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian-bullseye.list
sudo apt update

Add your hardware

Use this command: 

sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload

Preserving the environment variables (-E or --preserve-env option of sudo) allows hw-probe to submit some aspects of your graphical display (X11 only).

Sample output: 

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

CategoryHardware