h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hello again all readers,

The other day I set up a little script to do some research on computer hardware in Linux, basically I wanted to use the bios as a source of information but the bios is well known for giving out variable information depending on machine and motherboard manufacturer.

So I crafted a simple bash script which would call both a few python modules, the dmidecode program and grab some info from HAL. varified by a dump of cpuinfo and ioports; package it all up into a tar and allow it to be sent back to me so I could test my code on many machines without having physical access to many machines.

I created a thread in ubuntuforums, I got about maybe 20 to 30 replies... then on Sunday BOOM 400 emails arrive in my inbox all giving me their hardware profiles. What had happened is someone had linked my request on ubuntuforums to digg.com and it got a lot of diggs; even ended up on the first page. there were some confused emails too not reading what I had original written in my post.

Over all I now have a great statistical significant sample of hardware which I can test any hal or dmi code for errors and problems.

Say Lavie (we do)