Re: "Intelligence"-gathering survey/software

[Kevin Forge <forgeltd@pop.netaddress.usa.net>]

Erik Walthinsen wrote:  ( And displayed why he get's a cool nick )
> 
> 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?

How much of the proper information is actually in the registry however
and
how much is simply reported by the driver at run time ?  For this reason
alone it may still be better to run under windows.
-- 
"Make easy things easy, and hard things possible."
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