h-node.com new website for hardware database
Hello guys,
I have built a website from scratch, wiki styled, in order to catalogue all the hardware that works with a fully free Gnu/Linux Distribution. The website is the following:
http://www.h-node.com
You can create a new account and add new hardware. All your modifications will be saved in the history of the device you are adding/editing. You can add a detailed description for every device and see the differences between a revision of a device and the previous revision.
You have to indicate the distribution you are using for the test: only fully free distros are allowed, according to the fsf list of fully free distributions (BLAG, Dragora, Dynebolic, gNewSense, Music GNU+Linux, Trisquel, Ututo, Venenux).
At the moment only notebooks, wifi cards and video cards can be added to the archive but the website is rapidly growing and new types of hardware will be added as soon as possible. I've tested (and inserted) all the hardware that I own.
You can help the project by inserting new hardware in the database. I hope that the hardware database could rapidly grow and help the free software community and who wants to use a fully free GNU/Linux distribution.
thanks
buy
Antonio
Thank you Antonio for you support for libre softwre.
There is already http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Hardware/Freest
Why are you dupilcating efforts?
--
Saludos/Greetings
Quiliro Ordóñez
593(2)340 1517 / 593(9)821 8696
Even The Troops Are Waking Up
ACTA – Un acuerdo que puede garantizar la crucificción de
internet
GNU should mean "GNU's not
Ubuntu!
Estas son opiniones personales y no representan la posición de ninguna
organización.
On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Quiliro Ordóñez <name at domain> wrote:
> Thank you Antonio for you support for libre softwre.
> There is already http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Hardware/Freest
> Why are you dupilcating efforts?
>
I think is more dedicated and organized than the libreplanet wiki.
Besides it could gather a wider attention from the community than just the
LibrePlanet one.
> --
> Saludos/Greetings
> Quiliro Ordóñez
> 593(2)340 1517 / 593(9)821 8696
> Even The Troops Are Waking Up
> ACTA – Un acuerdo que puede garantizar la crucificción de internet
> GNU should mean "GNU's not Ubuntu!
> Estas son opiniones personales y no representan la posición de ninguna
> organización.
>
--
Luis A. Guzmán García
I know you are adding sections as we go but how about printers. Almost everyone uses one of those.
On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 12:35 AM, <name at domain> wrote:
> I know you are adding sections as we go but how about printers. Almost
> everyone uses one of those.
It is a great idea, since the HPLIP (talking about HP printers) requires a
big amount of devices to work with non-free firmware (even the driver is
free).
--
Luis A. Guzmán García
I watched at your site. I have some remarks to do in order to improve it (from my point of view).
I would like to see the PCI ID or the USB ID of each device (you precise the version of the device well, but I am not sure everyone will do so).
Also, the driver used could be useful (and maybe its version). And when there are several drivers available for one device, it would be useful to know which driver(s) work with completely free software.
For the Wi-Fi cards, I like to be able to sort the cards by interface (USB, PIC, Express Card, etc.). It could be done by adding a property in the entry (like its vendor) or by making subcategories. It is the same with the graphic cards (PCI, AGP, PCI Express or integrated).
Hey thanks for the replies!
I need help in order to choose what features are useful and what are not.
ghoulgat and Luis Alberto: printers will be added as soon as possible.. and I need help in the choose of the fields. Thanks!
Julius22: ok I will read carefully your remarks. One question: where is it possible to find out the PCI ID or the USB ID of each device? Does the lspci command gives those informations. Perhaps the driver used can be specified inside the description field in a paragraph named: "configuration" or "used drivers". We could choose a standard format for the description of each device.
Sort the hardware for interface: it could be a good idea :)
thanks
Antonio
> One question: where is it possible to find out the PCI ID or the USB ID of each device?
lspci -nnk
lsusb
>
> > One question: where is it possible to find out the PCI
> ID or the USB ID of each device?
> lspci -nnk
> lsusb
>
>
ok thanks
Ok, I've added the PCI ID/USB ID entry for the video cards and the wifi cards. I've called it VendorId:ProductId entry.
I've also added a new paragraph in the help page in order to explain how to find out the VendorId:ProductId of one hardware
Why isn't a more standard markup used, like MarkDown or one used by a
popular wiki? Both Trisquel and gNewSense use wikis with simpler
formatting.
Meaning of some icons wasn't obvious for me, maybe it would be better to
include also text (all user-editable sites which I know use text links
for "edit", "add" and similar actions).
Is the site's source code available under a free license (e.g. GNU
AGPL)? It would be consistent with the aim of supporting free software.
The copyright notice on each page is misleading, since there is no
copyright assignment for text added by users.
> Why isn't a more standard markup
> used, like MarkDown or one used by a
> popular wiki? Both Trisquel and gNewSense use wikis
> with simpler
> formatting.
>
the wiki formatting is similar to bbcode. You can find the list of the allowed wiki tags in the help page together with their meanings
> Meaning of some icons wasn't obvious for me, maybe it would
> be better to
> include also text (all user-editable sites which I know use
> text links
> for "edit", "add" and similar actions).
I think it could be feasible
> Is the site's source code available under a free license
> (e.g. GNU
> AGPL)? It would be consistent with the aim of
> supporting free software.
I have to decide, I think it will be GPL. I will let you know :). I think I will publish the source code as soon as it will be ready and perfectly checked
> The copyright notice on each page is misleading, since
> there is no
> copyright assignment for text added by users.
It's not misleading: the copyrithg is h-node and the text is licensed under FDL (the same as Trisquel do, copyright Trisquel project, text licensed under FDL). In this way you can know who hold the copyright (A user can delete its account: in that case who hold the copyright of the text it hade previously inserted, before the cancellation of the account?)
I won't be able to answer during the next few hours, sorry. See you this evening!
thanks a lot!
Antonio
> The copyright notice on each page is misleading, since there is no
> copyright assignment for text added by users.
Perhaps you are right, there could be some misleading. I have to add a notice to specify that the copyright holder of the submitted text will be the h-node project.
For me it is not important that the h-node project holds the copyright of the hardware specifications, I have simply thought that this was the best way to keep the database free (licensing it under FDL). For me all the data could be published in the public domain.
bye
Hello,
two important changes:
1 - All the hardware pages at h-node.com are now in the Public Domain
2 - It's now possible to download the whole database in xml format. Please consider the importance of such a xml file. It would be possible to build a desktop program that can download the up-to-dated archive and tell the user if his hardware can work with a fully free distro and eventually suggest what hardware it should buy (in order to use a fully free distro)
thanks
Antonio
> 1 - All the hardware pages at h-node.com are now in the Public Domain
CC0 [0] would be probably more useful in non-US jurisdictions [1] [2].
[0] http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
[1] http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2010/mar/16/0x23/
[2] http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0_FAQ
> 2 - It's now possible to download the whole database in xml format.
> Please consider the importance of such a xml file. It would be
> possible to build a desktop program that can download the up-to-dated
> archive and tell the user if his hardware can work with a fully free
> distro and eventually suggest what hardware it should buy (in order to
> use a fully free distro)
Very nice change.
For a program checking installed hardware, pciids and other
more-specific machine-readable data would be useful to identify the
hardware.
A desktop program for uploading the data also would be useful, since
nearly all data can be automatically obtained (it could be done in the
same program).
The information about discovering hardware was eye opening, It would have been nice to have sound in there too.