How many times have you not had to resort to requesting an opinion or even to ask for help from another to be able to know or have a reference on some type of component for you or your equipment, this in order to be able to make a good purchase and even have the bad luck that said component is not compatible with your team for X reason.
It is true that for desktops the compatibility problem is not big or the fact of having a certain risk that X hardware component is not recognized, since this type of equipment usually has greater diversity and what we rely on is the processor and motherboard in order to know the compatibility.
But in the case of laptops (laptops, notebooks) things usually change and this is largely due to the restrictions that the manufacturer includes in the equipment (why? I have asked myself the same thing) and for the most part these restrictions are related to the capacity of how much RAM the equipment can support, even if you perjure that can take more.
Touching on this issue of compatibility is because a few days ago, unveiled a new way to search for components compatible to upgrade a computer using the hw-probe utility and the database project compatible hardware Linux-Hardware.org.
The idea behind this is quite simple, since they are based on the different configurations that users share on the same model of computer (or motherboard) and with this we can know that different individual components can be used for different reasons: a difference in the configurations, an update or repair performed , the installation of additional equipment, etc.
In consecuense, if at least two people sent telemetry to the same computer model, to each of them you can be offered a list of components of the second as options for upgrade.
This method does not require knowledge of computer specifications and special knowledge of the compatibility of individual components, as it is enough for the user to simply select those components that have already been installed and tested by other users or vendors in the same computer.
On the sample page for each computer in the database, a "Find compatible parts for upgrade" button has been added to find compatible hardware.
Therefore, to find compatible components for X computer, it is enough to create a sample of it in the most suitable way. At the same time, the participant helps not only himself, but also other users in updating the equipment, who will subsequently search for components.
In addition, it is possible to make use of this even when using operating systems other than Linuxas the desired computer model can be found in search or sampled using any Linux USB Live. The hw-probe program is available today on most Linux distributions, as well as most BSD systems.
How to install and use hw-probe?
For those who are interested in being able to make use of the utility, as mentioned above, hw-probe is available in most Linux distributions and if you do not have it installed, we share here three methods so that you can have it .
The first way to install hw-probe on Linux is by downloading the latest stable version of the AppImage of this, for this we are going to address to the following link and we are going to download the latest stable version.
Once the download is done we are going to open a terminal, we are going to place ourselves in the path of the folder where the file was downloaded and we are going to type the following command taking into account what to see. 1.5 is the last stable:
chmod +x ./hw-probe-1.5-149-x86_64.AppImage
And to know the hardware compatibility we type:
sudo -E ./hw-probe-1.5-149-x86_64.AppImage -all -upload
Now another method is installing the flatpak package from the utility with the following command:
flatpak install flathub org.linux_hardware.hw-probe
While the last method to install the utility is with the help of Snap packages and we can install the utility by typing:
sudo snap install hw-probe
And finally to know the hardware compatibility:
sudo -E hw-probe -all -upload
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