I managed to run smolt and upload a profile to the hardware database. As far as I have seen, nobody has done that before (probably just because nobody has bothered). Thought it would be fun though.

If anyone is interested how it was done, I added a small "how to" in the smolt wiki.

The next thing I was planning to play with was Phoronix... got a problem installing php5-cli though. There was a version for older Maemo OSes in the maemo-hackers repository but that did not want to install due to a dependency of an older library (libssl0.9.7).

Question: What is smolt and how would it be helpful to me?

Smolt is a hardware profiling software. Currently only Fedora and OpenSuse include it by default, which skews the statistics towards x86/x86_64 hardware. In fact, for embedded or hardware-designed-for-linux such as the N900 it does not make much sense since all the hardware already works.... but as a method to get "counted" or turn attention to alternative architectures/form factors it could serve its purpose.

Personally I was mostly just curious what hardware it would report. Since all N900 should be the same it does not make much sense to add more of the same I guess. But still cool... or perhaps thats just me.

EDIT: One potential use case to upload N900 hardware profiles to Smolt would be to enable community distros (such as Mer or a community driven MeeGo variant) to identify the hardware that requires out-of-mainline drivers or proprietary firmware.

by the way... does anyone have a link to instructions for packaging etc? I thought it might be nice to try to make debs from my experiments.... and what about uploading to garage ? permissions? The python urlgrabber could be directly copied from debian....