spin kickstart/minimization cleanups

[Richard Hughes]

On 21 April 2010 16:17, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> I've been banging a gong about something like that for years; right now
> it's much too hard to know what you're supposed to do to make
> $RANDOM_GADGET that you just plugged in actually work, but we can hardly
> install the software for every USB device under the sun by default.
> There's a clear need for something like this. Really it's just a kind of
> widget that sits between udev and PackageKit, I think.

It already exists, and is the GpkHardware GObject that lives in
gnome-packagekit. In Fedora we disable it by default, but Suse use it
to great affect. Fedora just uses GpkFirmware which intercepts missing
firmware requests from the kernel and offers to install the firmware
and then soft-replug the device.

The hard bit (and why it's disabled in Fedora) is working out what
software needs to be installed for a given bit of hardware. It's
really the kind of thing that needs to be added to udev as just a
simple rule, and then enabled in gnome-packagekit.

Richard.