An Idea

[Oxygen]

Ok, I downloaded SuSE 10 to get my Linux back on. Been a while since I've done anything after the disaster that was Ubuntu (It was recommended but it failed to installl correctly, not sure why) anyway, I was thinking of things I'd have to do, mainly drivers. I've never had a good time with Linux drivers, something has always gone wrong, particually on my wireless card of which I posted many, many threads about. I finally got it to work of which I wrote a tutorial about it, which looking over it now is not much use to people not using my wireless card.

The main problems I had with this were finding drivers and installing them. If by chance I found a driver there would be a missing readme file and the lot.

So on that, I had an idea. What if there was a website with a full list of drivers for specififc hardware? I'm not sure if this had been done before (Google gave no good results searching for 'linux drivers' and 'drivers database' and I'm sure MySQL isn't directly helpful to the problem)

So say nobody had done this before and I went ahead and did it, who would be willing to help. My skills would be writing PHP code but I couldn't do any GFX or anything, I suck at eye-candy!

[synapse13]

You are not the first to be bitten by the south african tree squirrel. That distro is
NOT noobie friendly. And even to me,someone with a moderate amount of linux know-how, after evaluating it, it did'nt make the cut. Shuttle-boy needs to dump a few more million into it.

[Cabhan]

It's certainly an interesting idea, though I personally find it to be somewhat common sense. Graphics drivers are on the nVidia site: wireless drivers are either at the site (if provided), or at ndiswrapper (and tutorials for that abound).

Having said that, if you feel there's a need for it: go for it! There're certainly a lot of people around here who can give you the info on which drivers are for what and where to find 'em.

[Oxygen]

Hey! Everything worked, wireless drivers worked in record time. If suse is not user friendly then I'd feel better! I love SuSE. Anyway on topic and to the point.

This website would have some kind of community, it would be a little more dynamic than an apache page listing the directory files. You'd be able to set your computer specs and search for dirvers to suit it. You could upload driver installation guides and things. Some drivers are easy to find like graphics drivers, but some are a god forsaken pain to find! And even worse to install! I surpose it would be aimed at the newer sort of Linux people. Still good!

[ThoughtVelocity]

Sounds like a good idea. I just dumped some new equipment in my windows box and am trying to determine if it will work or not as a linux dual -boot. Right now its a lot of hunt and peck. It would be nice to have it in one place.

[Roxoff]

I think it's a good idea too. You'd need to be careful with some proprietary drivers (video drivers here are a good example) as you'd need permission to publish them on the website. (But I'd go first to the nVidia site for video drivers anyway - out of habit).

Of much more use is a repository of drivers for less-ubiquitous kit, such as obscure network cards, internal winmodems, printers, USB coffee makers, etc. Once the repository was in place, you'd then need to find a way to keep it up to date (but that's where the community comes in, I suppose - you couldn't find all the drivers yourself). Having it tied into a forum site like this one might help too.