Hardware Detection for GNU/Linux

[C. Gatzemeier]

Am Wednesday 02 June 2004 22:48 schrieb Josh Triplett:

> I have written an informal design specification of a hardware detection
> and configuration system for GNU/Linux.
> http://linuxlab.cs.pdx.edu/~tripletj 

Thank you! I've looked for info on utopia before but did give up since the 
info seemed so scattered. The document now gives a nice overview.

Under "Reviewing and Configuring Current Hardware" the problematic with past 
efforts for configuration utilities is nicely explained. This struck me as 
particulary interesting because I once put together the wiki page for a 
potential solution for this.

Maybe you've come across the xdg-list discussion about a common configuration 
API. 
There are already multiple possible alternatives, and I don't want to say that 
the API Config4GNU has so far should just be adopted, but I'd say its layered 
and modular concept for a unifyed config representation is very well worth 
investigating. For communication it seems to me that building on D-BUS like 
the Hardware Detection iself instead of using Config4GNUs current 
implementation may be a good idea.

An overwiew over the Config4GNU (or CFG for short) layers and architecture is 
available on http://freedesktop.org/Software/CFG . Hopefully together with 
the CfgFAQ, that is also on the wiki, the concepts and benefits get exposed.
It would be great if general configuration and automatic hardware 
detection/configuration could work hand in hand.

Regards,
Christian