Frequently Asked Questions

Some commonly asked (or not asked even) questions regarding LHCS.

1. What is LHCS?

LHCS is a hardware testing suite. It's composed of a mixture of readily available, continuously improving set of test programs plus a few coding hacks and a graphical user interface.

LCHS is mainly targeted for system administrators and OEM manufacturers to test their hardware. I believe that a systematic approach to hardware certification process yields a better return on hardware investment. On the long term, less problems can be encountered and relatively less budget can be planned. This is where LHCS stands: Test your hardware, and if it succeeds, run Linux on it.

LHCS is not a benchmarking or standards tool. Benchmarking is another concept in test arena. What LHCS does is that it only recognizes the hardware on the machine, and performs some "does it work?" test.

LHCS does not try to address software tests, so if you are a software developer and want to catch bugs in your code, than LHCS is not for you.

If you are interested in standards, visit Free Standards Group, www.freestandards.org for more information about Linux standards compliance,

2. Is it another test/certification software?

Yes, but with a graphical user interface.

3. How can I run this?

You need a working, decent, new Linux system in order to install and run LHCS. The test suite is supposed to be friendly to the hardware, but you shouldn't run it on a production system.

You also need kdelibs and Qt library. If you've performed a full installation, then most probably these libraries are already on your machine.

Rpm command tells you whether kdelibs and Qt is installed or not. Run rpm -qi qt and rpm -qi kdelibs from a console. If you have Qt library version > 3.0 and kdelibs > 3.0, then LHCS will run fine.

In order to install LHCS, follow the installation instructions in the README file that comes bundled with LHCS package.

4. I've run the test. Now what?

If you have a new version, then the test results are written on a file in /tmp directory and a LHCS dialog will show the full path of this file.

You can then further investigate what problems are encountered during the test, by opening this file with a text editor.