Idea for Hardware configuration website

[krinkle]

Does a website exist that is like a web directory for getting specific pieces of hardware configured? I'll post my little story so that it's easier to see where the idea is coming from, but more importantly, where it should go. You can probably just skip it if you want =)

--story--
I just got a midiman (maudio) audiophile soundcard. It took me about a week to get it installed and working. The problem was the alsa .90rc6 drivers (the version in portage) have major bugs with that chipset. If you upgrade to rc7, the bugs are fixed (i think previous versions of alsa work as well). It took me many hours of going through mailing lists just to find a short sentence at the end of a post mentioning that. To say the least, it was a little frustrating that it was so hard to find such a big bug. Now I have it working (mostly), but the problem i'm running into is that the chipset (ice1712) apparently isn't quite normal. It uses a different mixer program (envy24control) becuase the card has different controls or something, i don't quite understand yet. The only explination of this I could find is the volume control is actually an attenuator on the card. Yeah, ok, that explains everything [sarcasm]. Looking around at mailing lists and message boards, I know I'm not the only one that's having some issues with the card. But I have to go to 40 different places to find one bit of advice. I also found a little trick that i haven't seen mentioned anywhere. I would like to let other people having trouble with thier card know, but where should i post it so that everyone (even newbies) could see it?
--end story--

That's why i think there should be a centralized location linux users could go to see info on thier hardware. The usefulness of the site is that it would be a single place people could go and post/read configuration information. There are probably 20 people working independantly on the same thing. If they could work together, i'm sure it would be much more productive. I'm not talking about just developers; users too. If i could go to a website, look up my piece of hardware, and it takes me to a site that everyone else is going to, it would not only make life easier, but i'm sure progress would come much quicker. It would probably be very useful for people new to linux too. If they are having a problem with thier video card, they might not know how to descibe thier problem. All they know is that "it doesn't work." It's hard to do a google search for something you can't describe. At the least they would have a starting point where they could see some major problems that they might not otherwise be aware of (like bugs in a cetain version of the driver, or that they need a special program to configure their hardware). Even if it was just a set of links, it would still be useful.

I want to start working on a web site for configuring ice1712 chipsets, I'm not good at web design, but it's the content that counts, right? It's not that I know a lot about how to configure it, but I can share as I learn. That way, someone else can set thier card up faster and use thier energy to solve the next config problem, not the one that I just had and solved already. If such a website exists, I'd like to know. There are a lot of general purpose howto's, but I think it's time for something a little more specific. Just wanted some opinions on this, feel free to flame

[Mitchybums]

It sounds like a great idea. Could be done here in the forum as a thread, or you could use something like phpNuke as a portal site and put everything in there.
Problem you will run into is the distributions.
Everything differs per distribution as well.
It's gonna be a HUGE database if you are gonna do it hardware based. patches for different distributions and the like.

If it's gonna be based on Gentoo, I think it would more likely deserve on this site itself.

just my 2 pennies

[kres]

Heya...

A group of co-horts and I have been planning a site just for that sort of thing. We were gunna stroe the actual drivers/files/posts into a MySql database.

We have the schema designed and were poking around at a script to rip down new file content.

Have you gotten anywhere with your idea? and more importantly have you found any designer types willing to play with you. My design skills are quite lame...
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Kres