Proposals for 'Feisty Fawn'

Here I'm going to sum up some with a nice ToC at the beginning.

- Wiki -Like Integration for Hardware help
- Integrated Network Assistant (Including basic support for WinModems Based on availabiliy)
- Community Maintained (Strictly formatted.) Help Wiki-like DB

Wiki integration for hardware help:

Imagine this, you get your network adapter working aces, you plug in a new... printer for examples sake that is known to need minor tweaking to get working. The user sees a nice alert (a la dapper toast system.) Alerting them their piece of hardware may not work out of the box and offers them information for getting it to work. It opens a Page in the browser explaining how to get this hardware working (See Point four).

This would require a locally maintained mirror reference per hardware to be done quickly and painlessly. this database would list hardware calls (As would be seen in the 'Device Manager') and translate them to a call number for example this particular printer could be 1234567 this would open wikinode 1234567 on click. A nice background task (Easily turned off at first run for non newbies) would run and check any new hardware for this. That could be replaced by some kind of hot plug script as far as I know to test new hardware and view it against this local database (Updated by a deb package weekly or something). Think of the Wine AppDB.


Integrated Network Assistant:

Refer to the above section, now think of other possible applications... the infinite problem of WiFi, and win-modems! Imagine this, a nice Network Assistant that can be run, it attempts to detect plugged in hardware by the same route as the Device Manager. this is of course assuming the user says 'My device is not listed here!' For those situations where WiFi Cards don't work but are detected, you know a nice clause for that so we don't waste time where not needed.

This would like above easily either pull from some kind of feed, or link directly to a page instructing you how to get it working, based on past use experience, and a rating system to display which guide helped the most. This guide also mind you can recommend packages assuming there is another available connection otherwise none of this happens. This is why I also suggest a similar portion of Expresso (Is it still called expresso? Oh well.) To handle this but with the packages local and the help DB watered down and organized. this is of course only for the open source non restricted drivers drivers in deb form. Such as SLmodemD (Works for my Winmodem) along with many Wifi drivers which are OSS.


- Community Maintained Hardware specific Help

What we have now for hardware help in wiki form is awesome but it's also mixed into the forum, the Bug boards, all over! I propose a single centralized user maintained, staff moderated web application to handle hardware help, notes, recommended packages, etc.

It would have a nice tagging system which local applications would search through for their hardware as discussed above. You know I have an xyz blah brand pcmcia card that just wont work! The local program intelligently searched for the model under the brands category and pulls up help from this wiki-type-thing.

The applications of this are endless.