Pootypedia 0.05

Pootypedia is a software that helps you track hardware among your users. Typically you install the server part, configure the client part, and distribute it to all people who are willing to report their hardware and software configuration to you. The program is made available, free of charge, under the GNU Public License (GPL).

The typical user of Pootypedia would be a software project which wants to know about the hardware that its users install the software on. Names that come to mind are Fedora, Debian, SuSE, and other Unix like systems.

The hardware probing is done through kudzu, a fine hardware detection program already known to run on a variety of hardware. In order to port pootypedias client to another architecture, you need to ensure that kudzu runs on it, and that you have some way of finding out the other essentials on the machine, the CPU, the memory, and a list of software (with version numbers) installed on that machine.

The server end doesnt much care where the client is running, as far as the client is capable of doing an HTTP POST, to send the report file over. The report file is in XML, and can be generated and stored on the client end. The client can choose to edit the hardware description, and can also choose to save the XML file. The server part of pootypedia is written with a view towards readability and extensibility.