Aiming to help both manufacturers and users steer clear of any such remaining headaches, Canonical on Thursday opened up to the public its vast database of components that are certified to work with Linux in general and its own distribution in particular."There has not been a comprehensive, up-to-date, freely available catalog like this for a long time," said Victor Palau, Canonical's platform services manager. "By making this open and easily searchable, we want to speed the component selection for Ubuntu machines, and allow us and our partner manufacturers to focus on the value-added user experience."

1300 Certified Components

Available on the Ubuntu site, the builds on the work already done by the Ubuntu project to list certified machines across the range of active releases of Ubuntu. More than 1300 certified components from 161 manufacturers are now listed by brand and by category, making the catalog the largest list of Linux-compatible components available, Canonical says.

Listed for chip maker , for example--notable in particular for the long-awaited it released last fall--are numerous controllers and other components, including those supported by the new brcm80211 driver. Also listed for each is which particular Ubuntu versions are supported.

Canonical's move is an exciting one for several reasons, all of which will benefit Linux users.