Re: i give up

Quoting Tim Kientzle <kientzle_at_freebsd.org>:

>>>> I have some ideas on that. The problem is it's sometimes hard to check
>>>> that given hardware is supported by FreeBSD, even in case you know and
>>>> want to do it. The list of supported hardware is often written in terms
>>>> of chipsets and manufacturers often produce cards using supported chips,
>>>> but named after their own trademark.
>
> I wonder if there's some way to partially automate
> collecting some of this information.
>
> Something like a "register" program people can
> use to register their FreeBSD installation that
> would optionally include hardware information.
> (Get a list of hardware IDs and running drivers
> from the kernel, then prompt the user to enter
> the actual hardware manufacturer/brand name for
> each one.)
>
> Then the process of registering the OS installation
> would also collect a lot of information about
> "known good" hardware.
>
> Bonus points, of course, if the register program
> first queries the web site to collect lists of
> hardware names that other people have already
> entered so that most of the time people can simply
> click and say "I'm using that one" and only
> occasionally have to type in a new brand name.
>
> The cross-reference information of vendor, hardware
> ID, driver, and OS version would be very valuable
> for people setting up new systems.  Of course,
> you'd want to keep careful counts of how often each
> piece of hardware was registered and provide an easy
> way for human editors to be able to clean up data
> afterwards, since there will be a certain amount
> of mispellings and simple nonsense.

OpenSolaris has a decent tool which collects your harware  
configuration and automatically adds it to a hardware database and  
also shows if your HW is suitable for Opensolaris:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect.jsp