The Smolt project
Smolt is a combined effort of various projects such as Fedora and openSUSE to gather hardware information of computers running Linux. Collecting this kind of data as a cross project initiative will result in a huge amount of data which can put pressure on hardware vendors to support linux better.
learn how to here.
While I think the gathering of hardware information on computers running Linux is useful, I also think it is misleading. Just because one has Linux running on a PC, does not mean all the hardware is functioning properly. Its quite often that Linux user will only have 90% of the hardware functional, and there is a remaining 10% that is not. From what I can see, Smolt makes no provision for that sort of comment.
Hence I believe this can NOT be considered a hardware compatibility list. As there is no assessment as to the compatibility.
But its a start at “semi-automating” this sort of information collection, and I think that is useful.
You are wrong about it not being a hardware compatibility list. The users are able to edit their own hardware information in a wiki-format and to tag each piece of hardware in different categories, such as “worked out of the box”, “needs configuration”, “needs third party drivers”, “does not work” and “breaks the system”.
So I would say that there is a truly collaborative touch to this hardware compatibility list.
As an OpenSuse 11.0 user, I had to install the program actively and at this moment there are only fedora releases in the smolt statistics:
Stats
I find this hard to believe that there would be less than 927 OpenSuse users who would be interested in this. Another issue with the OpenSuse version was that you were not provided with the required password to edit the entries through the GUI. If you run smolt in CLI, however, you get a password and can edit the compatibility categories for your hardware according to the pre-defined classes and add wiki-entries for your hardware.
There are still issues in clustering comparable entries (this can be clearly seen at the vendor statistics where the same vendor comes up under different names). Perhaps this is also an issue for the different hardware components. All my hardware was for example un-documented in the wiki-section.