On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 21:13, Maxwell Kanat-Alexander wrote:
Languages
GUI: PyGTK. It's clearly the Red Hat standard for GUI projects.
Backend: SQL and Python. Some C if required for interfacing with Open Source Projects we use.
Web Interface: PHP or Python. Once again, this might also depend somewhat on the other projects we integrate.
This is also a clear case for XMLRPC-like communication between client and server.
Other Implementation Notes
We have a lot of tools that can get data for us:
lspci, dmidecode, dmesg
What I _don't_ really think would be fun would be parsing the text output of those programs. MKJ thought it would be ideal if dmidecode could give us XML. Anybody know if there's a tool that already does this, or something we could start with? hwbrowser seems to make sense of that data somehow -- is there a way to get data out of it? Who's the maintainer of hwbrowser?
lspci and some other data can be communicated easily parsed from the numeric form:
[root@laptop root]# lspci -n 00:00.0 Class 0600: 1106:0305 (rev 03) 00:01.0 Class 0604: 1106:8305 00:07.0 Class 0601: 1106:0686 (rev 40) 00:07.1 Class 0101: 1106:0571 (rev 06) 00:07.2 Class 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 1a) 00:07.3 Class 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 1a) 00:07.4 Class 0601: 1106:3057 (rev 40) 00:07.5 Class 0401: 1106:3058 (rev 50) 00:07.6 Class 0780: 1106:3068 (rev 30) 00:0a.0 Class 0607: 104c:ac51 00:0a.1 Class 0607: 104c:ac51 00:0e.0 Class 0c00: 104c:8020 00:10.0 Class 0200: 10ec:8139 (rev 10) 01:00.0 Class 0300: 1002:4c4d (rev 64)
Ultimately all of this and other data should be converted into XML and communicated over the Internet. The pygtk applications on the client side displays human readable information based upon a lookup table from this data. That particular part isn't the challenge.
It would be a good idea to have people submit data and have a "No Problems Reported" status.
The program would probably be a small applet that exists in the tray until run. After that, it should disappear forever. The alternative is an icon on the user's desktop saying "submit your hardware information" or something like that.
I hope this applet would not be within the default Gnome/KDE profile, because then it would pop up on the user desktop of all users at least once. This is not ideal for massive multi-user systems like LTSP.
I believe this may be ideal for firstboot, and also choosable from the System menu. Perhaps there are better ideas...
Warren