From owner-freebsd-doc Sat Jun 1 17:48:32 1996 Return-Path: owner-doc Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id RAA17632 for doc-outgoing; Sat, 1 Jun 1996 17:48:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu (Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.34]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA17623 for ; Sat, 1 Jun 1996 17:48:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (jfieber@localhost) by Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id TAA28732; Sat, 1 Jun 1996 19:48:26 -0500 (EST) X-Authentication-Warning: Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu: jfieber owned process doing -bs Date: Sat, 1 Jun 1996 19:48:23 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber X-Sender: jfieber@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu Reply-To: John Fieber To: Francisco Reyes cc: FreeBSD doc Mailing list Subject: Re: Hardware compatibility list. Second round. In-Reply-To: <199606020009.AAA25556@pop01.ny.us.ibm.net> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-doc@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk [cc list trimmed...] On Sat, 1 Jun 1996, Francisco Reyes wrote: > For the same reason (too many combinations of hardware) just > having what doesn't work is not enough. Should someone believe > that their hardware will work because it is not listed in the > "incompatible" section? FreeBSD is in an awkward position with regards to publishing hardware compatibility. It "PC compatible" enough that maintaining any *comprehensive* list of compatible hardware is wildly unrealistic, yet we do not have anywhere near the resources to be able to accurately state that any PC with 8 megabytes of ram and a 100 megabyte hard drive will work. So, buing stuck in the middle, what sort of hardware information is most useful to: * People who already have their hardware and want to run FreeBSD. * People running FreeBSD but having some hardware difficulties. * People in a position of purchasing hardware with the knowledge that they will be running FreeBSD. The first group just wants to know *if* it will work. The second wants to know *how* to get to work, and the latter is probably more interested in how *well* it will work. I suspect the latter group is probably the easiest to satisfy because a fair population of FreeBSD users use pretty high powered systems, and a few are in dealership positions with opportunities to try out the latest and greatest. Information for the second group can only come from existing users war stories about how they managed to get the Zingle 987FX PCI bus vacuum cleaner controller working. The first group is the hardest because they will have *lots* of questions about hardware nobody here has ever heard of. A lot of it will be stuff the "power users" among us wouldn't dream of buying (like ide cdrom drives). I don't think we will ever be able to completely satisfy people in this department, but some effort is warranted. A lot of information to address these three needs exists in collective FreeBSD user community. The task at hand is to enhance access to this. Currently it lies burried in peoples brains, mailing lists, and newsgroup archives. Francisco is working on some web forms for collecting information from people, normalizing it so that it isn't quite so scattered about. Although we may want to put it in the handbook, I'm thinking it may be more useful as an interactive piece of software (web based or otherwize)... -john == jfieber@indiana.edu =========================================== == http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================