Reference to Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO goes to defunct domain

[Steven Peralta]

Documentation at <https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/installation-guide/amd64/hardware-supported.html> refers to a link titled "Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO" url=<http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO.html>. Following this link goes to a page that indicates the site may be up for sale and contains mostly links to commercial offers. This site appears to be defunct.

[Steven Peralta (sfperalta57)]

Sorry. Correction. The "Linux Hardware Compatibility HOWTO" site is active but has not been updated since 2007. That site contains a link to <http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/ieee1394.html> which is points to <http://www.linux1394.org/>. It's the linux1394 site that is defunct. However, the documentation at the HOWTO site appears to be somewhat out of date at best.

[Christopher Hotchkiss (christopher-hotchkiss)]

Is this an Ubuntu issue? It sounds like this is an issue with the linux documentation project.

[Christopher Hotchkiss (christopher-hotchkiss)]

I have notified the author of the howto of the dead link.

[Steven Peralta (sfperalta57)]

Yes I realize this is somewhat indirect, but may I make the argument that since Ubuntu 10.04 documentation defers to the Linux hardware compatibility docs as the authoritative source, there is a reasonable expectation that those docs should be up to date and mostly accurate. If the referenced site is hopelessly out of date (2007.. yikes!) then either the site should be updated or Ubuntu should provide more relevant documentation on their own web site.

I humbly rest my case.

[Christopher Hotchkiss (christopher-hotchkiss)]

That is a good point. However I'm not aware of a centralized list for generalized linux hardware compatibility anymore (thankfully the question of "Will it work?" is yes 99%+ of the time now). I guess the best thing the ubuntu documentation team could do is mark the Hardware-HOWTO as an out of date source instead of the authoritative one.

For now I'll keep this bug as confirmed and see if the author responds and then forward the bug to the documentation team.

[Josh Meyer (joshuameyer712)]

For me this still is a big issue for the Linux community becuase more than three and a half years later the situation has only become worse. The linked Hardware-HOWTO still is at a status of 2007 and therefore useless for today's hardware. The hardware support part of the Ubuntu Wiki was stalled (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport) and Ubuntu Friendly was stopped (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFriendly). Additionally, several other non-Ubuntu hardware databases closed their gates.

If the "Will it work? is yes 99%+ of the time now" would be true, than all of this would not be a problem at all. Unfortunately, at least my experience collected over the last years is much lower than 99%+ (except maybe for network cards).

For the moment, the only useful and nearly up-to-date centralized database for consumer hardware seems to be the http://www.linux-hardware-guide.com although some sections are still sparsely filled. Although working together with the community, this database seems to be partly commercial. But as experience teached us over the last years, databases based on community contribution and voluntary work seem not to last for very long.