Landscape Server

Hardware comparison and tools

Asked by Martin Owens

Hello,

I have just discovered this tool that I believe is intended to help manage large networks of computers; I'm curious about the hardware aspect of the project because I'm developing a user desktop orientated gui application which will serve similar niche but a user of a single computer (www.dohickey-project.com).

I wanted to know what your technical details were for detecting, filtering and sorting hardware components. so far I've managed to come up with a number of models to make the data from HAL and dmi human readable but I always love seeing how others plan on doing it.

Regards, Martin Owens

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Gustavo Niemeyer
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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#1

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

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Martin Owens (doctormo) said : 		#2

I'm not quite sure I understand why my question is being ignored, I assume because your all very busy people; I'd still like to know what your up to so we're not wasting time and can learn from each other.

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Gustavo Niemeyer (niemeyer) said : 		#3

I'm sorry. I guess the main reason why your question wasn't answered before is because the project went public recently, and so we've never really used the feature for answering questions here. We'll try to be more careful about it in the future.

We have used data from HAL, and made it human readable simply by organizing it in a pleasant way. If you look at applications like the Device Manager you'll get an idea about how to do that.

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Martin Owens (doctormo) said : 		#4

Sorry you must have misunderstood the question. I'm not asking you how to do that since I already have my own methods of combining HAL and DMI data.

If what your saying is that the tool displays similar information to the "Device Manager" then it's really an unfiltered node tree. you can have a look at Dohickey to get an idea of what I mean by "Hardware Information" where as what I think you mean is "Device Information" as such I must have misread what your objectives were.

I was curious to see how other Hardware Information tools combined data into a reasonable form; unfortunatly most tools are device based not hardware based (different focus) for instance lshw is a device listing but has a lot of hardware information probing too; where as lsusb and lspci are simply device listings.

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Best Gustavo Niemeyer (niemeyer) said : 		#5

I understand what you're asking now. Confusion comes form the fact that there's no clear distinction between "Device Information" and "Hardware Information" because "device" and "hardware" mean the same thing depending on context [1].

The answer is that we don't try to detect further device information besides what's provided by HAL at this point.

[1] http://foldoc.org/index.cgi?query=device

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Martin Owens (doctormo) said : 		#6

Thanks Gustavo Niemeyer, that solved my question.