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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 pootypedia's 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 doesn't 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.

You can get the latest release of pootypedia from Pootypedia's SourceForge Page.

What do you need?

For the Pootypedia server-side report gatherer, you absolutely need the following:

For the Pootypedia client-side reporting tool, you need the following:

The requirements on the client are a little weak. You absolutely need Python, since that is what the reporting program is written in. Everything else is optional, in a way. If you don't need hardware information, then you can do without kudzu, for instance. Similarly, if you don't want package information to be reported, then you can do without both rpm and dpkg based systems. However, this will entail that you can hack the server-side program (or politely ask one of the developers), to do this, so that the server-side knows not to expect the relevant information. All source-code is written in Python, and is meant to be readable, so feel free to dive in the code and fix or alter stuff. It is a good idea to share your changes so everyone gets to benefit from your hard work.

Pootypedia is written entirely in Python, with the database managed by MySQL. The source code is available, and is looking for your views, suggestions, bug-fixes and comments.

Pootypedia is being maintained by Vikram Aggarwal. My domain name is gmail.com. My email address is vikrama at that domain name.


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