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Registering your hardware with Hardware4Linux to help other members of the community

by rasker — last modified Jan 21, 2009 11:00 AM
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Hardware4Linux is a tool and a website to register your hardware with an easy facility to make your installation notes public to help others installing that hardware. It is complimentary to Smolt hardware registry but is somewhat easier to use and user friendly. You can quickly and easily upload your machines configuration and append notes to hardware you had problemns with or had to to manually configure.

Fedora already registers your hardware with Smolt (you did say yes to Smolt on the first run wizard, didn't you?). Smolt might be a little difficult to use to quickly put up notes on installing a particular flavour of hardware. Hardware4linux is easier and a little more user friendly.

Applicable to Fedora Versions

  • Fedora (All)

Requirements

  1. 5 to 10 minutes of free time to help the community
  2. Internet Access
  3. Basic familiarity with the command line (terminal) to run a few commands.

Doing the Work

We will download and install the Hardware4Linux collector, collect our hardware's information and upload it to the Hardware4Linux website.

  1. Download the hardware4Linux Info Collector RPM to your home folder. These are generic RPM's but have a minor issue which we will work around. Click on this link to go to the download page. Use the links at the top of the page to get the "lsb-hardware4Linux.info-collector" rpm that is right for your architecture and save them to your home folder. Do not open it with package manager because the install will fail.
  2. Install the Rpm's. Open a terminal and execute the following commands: 
    su
    cd Download
    rpm -Uvh --nodeps lsb-hardware4Linux.info-collector*
    rm -f lsb-hardware4Linux.info-collector*
  3. Using the same terminal and su login execute the Information Collector: 
    /opt/hardware4linux.info/sbin/hwreport /tmp/report
  4. Close the terminal.
  5. If you don't have a login on the Hardware4Linux website then register now using this link.
  6. We now need to upload the information to the website. Login to the Harware4Linux website and click on the Add computer link on the left side of the page. Add a name for your system. If it is a self build or a generic machine (i.e not made by a well known major International Manufacturer) then it is helpful to put the make and model of the motherboard in the Name field if known.
  7. Click on the browse button and browse to the /tmp folder and select the "report" file. Click on ok to start the upload.
  8. There is a short questionaire which covers common issues. Once answered that should be it, your hardware is registered!
  9. If you have any additional notes that might help other users these can be added at the end by browsing to the My computers link and clicking on the link to the hardware you have just uploaded. You can then either run through all the hardware and indicate whether it works or not and if not add any notes on things you did to make the hardware work or just add notes for particular bits of hardware for which you have additional information. This would be really helpful to other users. Make sure you add a note of the kernel version you are using. Use the following command in a terminal to find out your kernel version: 
    uname -r

Disclaimer

We test this stuff on our own machines, really we do. But you may run into problems, if you do, come to #fedora on irc.freenode.net

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