Hardware/Software configuration app for users to report known good/bad hardware/software

[JonathanThompson]

More than one user has asked: where do I find a known working hardware list? Another has asked: where do I fill out that information?

Because it can be a real nightmare to decipher things based on random input things, here is what I propose would be incredibly useful: an app that's in the Applications folder called "Report Hardware/Software Configurations" (feel free to call it whatever you want that works better) that does exactly that, in a user-friendly manner.

Here's what it would need to gather from the user:

1. Output from listdev
2. Output from listusb
3. User-friendly descriptions of their particular hardware by make/model, since there are many embedded peripherals that are used in different things, and it'd be nice to know such things. This would be entered by the user themselves, though they can always shrug off and ignore typing it.
4. Preferably the output of some benchmark applications that test all this stuff: even nicer (but not vital) would be performance results of said hardware doing various tests.
5. OS revision number, and also MD5 checksums of drivers installed. Why the MD5? Because some users may create custom drivers themselves, or grab them from different revisions, because the revision they're currently using fails on that hardware/driver combination. The OS revision number, along with all this other information, would also make it very easy to track down what changes broke certain hardware/software support down to smaller revision ranges.

Now, there's also a haiku-os.org side of things: it needs to break all these items down into a user-searchable list, both in a total system, as well as items in isolation, so people can get a better idea of what's known to work or not. Also, provide a web form for filling out what absolutely won't install for hardware, since they won't be running Haiku to do so.

[Disreali]

It should also grab the output from sysinfo.

Was BePCInfo ever open-sourced? would it be able to be used for this?

[waddlesplash]

Reverting earlier milestone change