[SWLUG] Hi all + final year uni project

[Timothy J Shapcott]

Hi there folks,

Forgive me if you have received this message twice, but I registered first
with a different email address, and then remembered that my mail server
changes "cf" to "cardiff" and so mailman probably rejected the first one
as coming from an unrecognised address. Anyway, back to the original
message... 

My name is Tim and I am a Linux-aholic.

Anyway, I am a final year student doing computer science at Cardiff Uni,
and for my final year project I have chosen to attempt to make some kind
of a web-based kernel config tool. I have named it webkac - the Web-based
Kernel Auto Configurator.

The basic idea is that you would be able to create a custom kernel for a
large number of identical machines (e.g. in a computing lab or cyber cafe,
or wherever) and that a lot of the choices would be done automatically.
The system would get the output from lspci (probably) to determine what
kernel options are needed.

My question is this: do any of you good folk know of any similar projects
that have been attempted in the past? Either the web front-end element or
the autodetection bit? If so I would be very interested in them for
research purposes. I googled around a bit and came up with a tool called
the Lothar Project, but it seems to have disappeared. Did any of you come
across this?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers

Tim