[glug-t] What's powering Knoppix ?

I booted a Knoppix CD on my laptop yesterday. To my astonishment, she(Knoppix) 
discovered the required drivers and configured everthing (including my 
soundcard, and track point) with ease! What's her secret, I wondered. Then I 
found "Discover" at http://hackers.progeny.com/discover/. Its a great thing 
that has happend to the Free Software world... 

-- Here's an excerpt from the guide ----

What is Discover?
Discover is a tool that reports information about a system's hardware. It uses 
operating system-dependent modules (selected at build time) to detect what 
hardware is actually on the system and provides system-independent interfaces 
for querying XML data sources about this hardware. These data sources contain 
specific information required to enable support for various devices via defined 
software interfaces. The tool may be accessed by linking to the Discover 
library or by calling discover (which itself links to the Discover library) and 
parsing its output. In the future, other interfaces (such as modules for 
interpreted languages such as Perl and Python) may be included.

Why use Discover? There are at least a few reasons:


Flexibility. Discover is designed from the ground up to be flexible. It is 
portable to a variety of operating environments, and its modular design 
supports addition of arbitrary methods for querying the host operating system 
(OS) about installed devices. Discover is also designed to be flexible in terms 
of the types of data that can be retrieved. Discover does not tie the user to 
retrieving only one type of information, such as the name of the Linux kernel 
module that should be loaded to support a given device. Instead, Discover 
supports the association of arbitrary data with hardware devices, typically 
through specification of an interface to the hardware in question, such as a 
Linux kernel module or an XFree86 server driver module.

Updatability. Many hardware-autodetection programs suffer from an inherent 
limitation in that they are restricted to reading hardware lists or databases 
that are stored on the local filesystem. This is not an efficient approach in 
the fast-moving world of consumer computer hardware, with new devices being 
introduced constantly. A couple of months after the latest version of your OS 
of choice is released, it may fail to recognize that the latest revision of, 
for instance, a video chipset is compatible with an older one, and can use the 
same software interfaces. Discover overcomes this problem by supporting the 
retrieval of hardware information via HTTP[1] ("over the Web"). When HTTP 
access is impossible, Discover falls back to locally-stored hardware lists.

Portability. On top of Discover's flexibility in terms of system interfaces to 
hardware, Discover has been deliberately written to be broadly portable to all 
of today's popular POSIX-compliant systems. Discover is not a Linux-only 
solution. Discover is intended to provide operating system vendors, computer 
manufacturers, and third-party vendors of software and peripherals with a 
powerful tool for describing the hardware they support to the interfaces they 
care about. Because Discover's data sources can be anywhere on the Internet, 
the OS vendor need not be the sole provider of hardware catalogs.

Usability. Discover is not an in-house tool designed to solve a narrow class of 
problems. Discover is designed to be easy to use from the perspectives of the 
individual system administrator, the applications programmer, and the hardware 
manufacturer or support staff. Discover's XML database structure, its 
command-line tools, and its library API are well-documented and support 
extensions to meet diverse demands.

Freely licensed. Discover has a copyright license that is highly adaptable to 
the needs of the varied audiences to which it is targeted. Under the so-called 
"UCB/BSD" or "MIT/X Consortium" terms, after the names of American universities 
and some very well-known software projects that used these terms, anyone is 
free to copy, modify and distribute the software, and to extend (or not) these 
same freedoms to those who receive the software from them. Progeny would like 
to see Discover adopted by a wide variety of existing software products, such 
the various GNU/Linux distributions; the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD projects; 
the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation; the XFree86 Project; system 
integrators; and the designers and manufacturers of computer hardware 
themselves. We believe that Discover's design empowers those with the most 
knowledge of hardware and the software interfaces to it to express that 
knowledge and make it available to the world, and thereby ameliorate
  an entire class of computer configuration problems. Progeny does not want 
Discover's licensing to stand in the way of realizing that dream, which is why 
we have chosen the license terms we have.

A moment must be taken to explain what Discover is not: Discover is not a 
replacement for the service ? usually provided by the underlying operating 
system kernel or a user-space program that interfaces with it ? of simply 
translating bus-specific vendor and model identifiers to human-readable names. 
Discover does perform its own translations of this data as a convenience for 
generating human-readable reports, but it does not attempt to enumerate all 
hardware devices that exist for a particular bus architecture. Rather, Discover 
is intended only to catalog data for which there is some useful information to 
impart regarding software interfaces. Facilities already exist in modern 
operating systems for answering the questions "What is the name of this 
device?" and "Who manufactured it?" Discover's role is to answer questions like 
"What Linux kernel module do I need to load to for this device to work?" More 
importantly, Discover will enable you to provide answers in the future to
  questions you don't even expect to ask today.

Discover is not intended to be a comprehensive hardware management tool. It is 
an enabling technology, designed to provide data which a tool layered above it 
can use. There are two applications provided with Discover to demonstrate how 
the library can be leveraged: the command-line utility discover, and a Linux 
kernel module loading script, discover-modprobe, designed to be invoked at 
system boot time.

- Vijay

-- 
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