On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 4:17 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
On Wed, 2010-04-21 at 09:40 -0400, Colin Walters wrote:
This looks like a good start. I think the way this kind of thing should work in general is that the system detects if you have the hardware, and dynamically installs support for it. We'd need some database mapping things like USB ids to packages. Networking is an exception; we should include as many drivers/tools for networking-related functionality as possible so that the system can be bootstrapped.
Basically: if you have a GPS chip, gypsy gets installed and runs. If you don't, it doesn't.
I've been banging a gong about something like that for years; right now it's much too hard to know what you're supposed to do to make $RANDOM_GADGET that you just plugged in actually work, but we can hardly install the software for every USB device under the sun by default. There's a clear need for something like this. Really it's just a kind of widget that sits between udev and PackageKit, I think.
Dumb question.... Can't the usb printer autoinstall just be extended to support other hardware? Based on usb/pci ids?
Peter