European Wafaa

There is something out there that has been growing slowly to try and help get better native support for hardware, and that something is Smolt. It was initially put into practice by the Fedora Project and I'm very glad to say that openSUSE is joining in the action

This is nothing terribly new, Smolt has been available on openSUSE for sometime, it was included on the DVD media and is in the Main OSS repo since 10.3. As with Fedora, it is purely an opt in item. So why the heck should one opt in with Smolt? Simple really, without getting decent metrics on the hardware being used by people running Linux it's hard to ensure that we have as best an "out of the box" experience as possible. Not only that but it will also enable a better Hardware Compatibility List to be compiled showing all components as nowadays many machines have the same components.

Oh, so you are interested? Good First thing is to install Smolt - zypper in smolt or select it from your preferred package manager. Once installed you have several options:
smoltGui - The Graphical Interface to the application.


smoltSendProfile - The command line interface to the application. Collates your data and sends it (once you're happy).


smoltDeleteProfile - The command line interface to remove your machine's profile (should you wish to).

Once you've sent your hardware details by either method, you are provided with a link to view your hardware profile. from here you can tweak your profile (with the Admin password provided specifically for your profile) and change the status for the individual components, and this includes: I don't use this/I don't know, Breaks System, Doesn't Work, Requires 3rd Party Drivers, Works but required additional configuration, Worked out of the box.

There are two views for the website, a Basic/Simple View:


Or an Advanced/Full List view:


Currently all metrics go back to the central Smolt servers and are available from there, but due to the distributed nature of the Smolt server architecture that doesn't need to be the case. Hopefully openSUSE can get their own servers which will in turn talk to the other Smolt servers and alleviate the load somewhat. So please join in and register your hardware to try and improve hardware support on Linux. Using metrics garnered from tools like this we and other projects have a better chance of getting hardware vendors to do the right thing and release either open specs for their kit or help us help them in creating open drivers.

UPDATE
There are currently two bugs that kind of hinder Smolt. They are Bug 460099 and Bug 444585