PlasticMonkey/HCLHowTo

My ideas (and some of Doncho's possibly) and what will possibly turn into the HCL HOWTO
OK, well all of this is a bit of a mess at the moment and I'm going to have to keep posting more and more stuff on it as the days go by, but please bear with me. Basically, the aim of this document is to first gather ideas, and then branch them into a main HCL HOWTO for contributors.

Please feel to email me if you wish to comment on any of these ideas or if you disagree

Inspiration/Other HCLs/Bases for Ideas
Ubuntu Linux Hardware Support Page, MDK's HCL , Linux Questions.org's HCL , IPCop's HCL

Tools and Utilities to be used to gather information on selected hardware
The following tools and utilities MUST be used to gather information on hardware, this is so we can have one set standard of reporting. I'm going to fill this page in as we go along, but here is one as an example.

For HDD speed tests and to retrieve other important information to report on HDD, please use hdparm.

Doncho is also planning to write a fetch-hardware-database script, however I'm not going to document this here yet, please visit his userpage for more information. He also recommends we use Basilisk for hardware testing, again please visit his userpage for more information.
 * * * *

Proposed Ease of Use Chart
I saw something like this on Redhat.com, and I liked it. So here it is. I recommend we use this as our hardware 'ease of use' chart.


 * ) *Difficult* Create/Modify Source Code
 * \ *Moderate* Compile Source Code
 * ) *Fairly Easy* Manually Configure through Configuration Files
 * D *Easy* Install an RPM
 * )) *Trivial* Install(ed) during Installation or through package on Install CD/DVD

Older Fedora Core Releases (Handling)
Hardware in the HCL should only relate to the most current stable release. If a contributor wishes to state that a selected hardware/device works in a previous release, he/she must do so by leaving a comment.

Organisation of Laptops page, and possibly a few other pages too
To aid in organisation and ease of use, I think we should have a subpage for each manufacturer but not for each individual device. i.e.

Laptop HCL o Toshiba (list all products and compatibility) o IBM (list all products and compatibility) o Acer (list all products and compatibility)

and so on and so forth.