Live-CD hardware check java applet

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad]

Hello everyone.

Lately, I've been thinking it would be very cool to have an applet on
the download page that could examine the users hardware, compare it to
values in a database and offer advise based on that. Will I be able to
just reboot into the live-session? Maybe I'll have to run
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg in order to see gdm? Do I need to use
proprietary drivers, and if so, are they included? Things like that.
In order to fill the database with as much information as possible, I
think the users should be asked permission to run the Ubuntu Device
Database application at first boot and after a dist-upgrade. I can't
see any reason why a user would refuse, but the option should be more
available than it is today. I don't know how the Java applet would
collect hardware information, though, but I can't imagine it to be
impossible. The real work would probably be to maintain the database.
Any thoughts on this?

Thanks,

Jo-Erlend Schinstad