X.org debugging info collection script

[Martin Olsson]

Hi,

I used to hang around in Linux channels a long time ago and see people 
come in asking why their sound didn't work etc. Usually there was a long 
discussion where someone asked them to run various commands and paste 
back the output (to figure out what card they had, what version of which 
packages were installed etc).

Nowadays on the #ubuntu channel this is handled very very efficiently 
and swiftly by a script that some really smart people wrote:

http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa/raw-file/2ea9a8a108ea/alsa-info.sh


This script just collects very quickly all the necessary information 
about hardware and software configurations on the persons machine.

Because this script makes it so much more convenient to help people with 
their sound card problems more sound related problems are actually being 
resolved. Typically people just wget this script straight out of the 
ALSA repository and the script also auto-updates itself if anyone tries 
to run an old version.

----

Here is the idea; I believe it would be really nice if X.org created a 
similar script which collected information about graphics hardware plus 
X.org configuration data such as driver versions, kernel version etc.

Having such a script would help improve both the quality and probably 
also the amount of useful reports coming back from X.org users to X.org 
developers.

The idea is to completely decprecate any long tedious lists of TODO 
items for X.org users that want to help out by reporting bugs. For 
instance the information gathering steps list here:

http://intellinuxgraphics.org/how_to_report_bug.html




		Martin