"Intelligence"-gathering survey/software

[Erik Walthinsen <omega@omegacs.net>]

I was looking through the registry on my parents' `doze95 box yesterday 
(trying to fix it ...what else??), I scanned through some of the 
system-level stuff, and found that all the hardware info and so on is quite 
readily accessible.  Moreover, there's a perl module to dig through the 
registry.

I'd like a volunteer to develop a program that will scan through the basic 
registry and gather all the information we'd need.  This program can then 
be distributed far and wide (i.e. comp.os.windows.* even), and we gather 
all the info it provides into a database, and use it to build the necessary 
lists of hardware and so on for saner installations.

Perl is probably a bad choice for this program, since almost no one has 
perl on their end-user machine.  It'll have to be written in C or C++, 
compiled directly on the target platform (win32).  I would suggest using 
wxWindows for the UI (minimal as it will be), since it can then be built 
under Linux, for the "mostly enlightened" who still have Windoze, but 
(correctly) prefer to run these things under Linux (since the registry is
just a file on disk).

One issue that will come up is privacy.  Obviously we'll only be gathering 
information on the hardware in the machine, so there's no real problem 
there, but we do have to be careful, and I would prefer to have some way 
for users to censor the information before it's sent to the central server. 
That way they take control of their own privacy.

The gathering of the information can be either via e-mail or a POST request 
to a web server.  Either way, it assumes they have net connectivity.  That 
might be bad, but getting around that would require a lot more work on 
everyone's part, and that's not likely to go over well with potential users.

Once we have the information, we can go through it and do things like xref 
the string(s) in the registry with our own database of supported and 
unsuppoprted hardware, so when it comes time to actually install a machine, 
we can just look at the registry, compare, and install the right modules 
and X servers, etc.

Takers?

TIA,
   Omega


     Erik Walthinsen <omega@seul.org> - SEUL Project system architect
        __
       /  \                SEUL: Simple End-User Linux -
      |    | M E G A            Creating a Linux distribution
      _\  /_                         for the home or office user