Hello Everyone, My name is Philipp Esselbach and I created the http://www.linuxcompatible.org website back in 2002.
The idea behind Linux Compatible was to create a user submitted hardware/software compatibility list for Linux. While I thought that it was a good idea in the first place, it appeared later to worked not so well. A few other websites even started their own compatibility lists in attempt to making better compatibility lists then the Linux Compatible one, which ended up that we have nowadays a few user submitted compatibility lists split all over the Internet, none of them nearly complete. I came 2005 to the conclusion that website based compatibility lists would never worked for an operating system like Linux, so I came up with the idea of CompatDB.org. CompatDB.org is not another compatibility website, it is more an attempt to create a free standard for user submitted compatibility list. Both the XML based CompatDB.org document format as well the compatibility data are released under the terms of the LGPL. The initial CompatDB.org Linux compatibility data based on the LGPL'd parts of the Linux Compatible compatibility list. Unfortunately, all data before Summer 2005 are not under the LGPL and thus not included. The current specifications of the CompatDB.org 1.0 XML document format can found here – http://www.compatdb.org/specs-1.0.txt and daily snapshots of the compatibility lists here - http://www.compatdb.org/page9.html. CompatDB.org is currently supporting 30 Linux distributions as well Windows and Mac OS (both separate lists) I believe CompatDB.org is a first step in the right direction but nowhere nearly perfect. I hope to find other enthusiasts that like to want participate in this project. I think that this project can grow, but only with an active community that brings in new ideas. Thanks for your time, Philipp Esselbach http://www.compatdb.org
