Smolt - openSUSE Wiki (original) (raw)

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• Smolt Retirement on Fedora project wiki is now in effect.
• http://www.smolts.org/ is retired.

As any project that lost upstream support, we had to remove it from openSUSE distribution. It was included in openSUSE releases from 11.1 to 12.2.

General

Gathering hardware information in one place is long existing desire in Linux. Smolt was not first attempt, nor only, but it was first initiative that was accepted by few major Linux distributions.

Smolt was a combined effort of few Linux projects to gather hardware information from computers running Linux with respect to user privacy. Information collection was voluntary and anonymous:

• Smolt program was configured not to run automatically; it had be started manually.
• When hardware profile was complete, program will present collected information and ask for permission to send it to the smolt server.

Collecting hardware information as a cross distribution initiative resulted in a huge amount of data which was intended to:

• aid developers in detection of computer hardware that is not well supported
• focus efforts on popular hardware
• provide workarounds and fixes trough tips on Smolt wiki or, in case of openSUSE specific tips, Portal:Hardware.
• help users to choose best distribution for their hardware
• convince hardware vendors to offer support for their hardware under Linux

Smolt and openSUSE HCL

HCL is acronym for Hardware Compatibility List. That is collection of articles created with intention to inform users how certain type of hardware works driven by openSUSE. Without Smolt adding hardware to the list is task for advanced users that knew how to test hardware. Now that Smolt is discontinued it is time to resort to the old methods.

External link

• Wikipedia article Smolt (Linux) updated to show it was discontinued.