Smolt is a hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project to enable users to submit their hardware profiles during installation. Smolt, like PackageKit from Fedora is also a distribution neutral tool and collects stats anonymously and sends it to a central database . The tool is also completely opt-in and guarantees your privacy. While openSUSE has been including Smolt in their repositories for sometime, they have now taken next step and added installer integration to it. There is also a call for other distributions to participate in this effort instead of reinventing the wheel. “Smolt is a project started by Fedora to collect information about the hardware that is used with computers running Linux. We at (open-)SUSE were seeing this demand as well and also were discussing a solution. But it became clear quite quickly that it does not make sense to have a per-distro solution for that – if we want to have momentum with a hardware database a combined effort promises the most.”
http://hardware4linux.info/ is there for some time. Smolts IS reinventing the wheel.
Smolt collects way more information and has a huge number of profiles. Just look at the stats. Mandriva was looking into adopting Smolt as well, the last time I talked to them.
openSuSE has included the ability to send the hardware profile as feedback via Yast Online Update for several releases now ,as far as i can remember .