Re: Question about hardware detection

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Stephan Foley]
> Hello all!

Hi.

> I am developing a Fluxbox Debian Pure Blend (see:
> https://wiki.debian.org/DebianFluxbox). The reason I'm posting to
> debian-edu is I was planning on hardware detection using discover,
> read-edid and mdetect, but was looking at hwinfo which is used by
> DebianEdu.

Can you explain why you want to detect the hardware and what you plan to
use that information for?

> I sent an email to debian-devel where I was told hardware detection is
> a thing of the past:
>
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/01/msg00264.html
>
> (great post, btw).
>
> So, I would like to ask this list to verify before dropping the idea
> of hardware detection.

There is a lot of hardware detection going on in Linux, and a lot of
decisions taken based on this, mostly behind the scenes, which is also
the topic of the post you point to.

I am the author of isenkram, mentioned in the post, and it provide two
pieces of the puzzle: mapping hardware to Debian packages, either user
space packages or firmware blob packages.  The Linux kernel and udev and
X.org handle other piezes of the puzzle.  Which piezes of the puzzle are
you trying to improve?

These days, the Debian Edu script only uses the hardware detection
scripts to report the hardware in installation reports for debugging.
All other parts of the hardware detection is handled by other packages.

-- 
Happy hacking
Petter Reinholdtsen