Fedora 7 Moonshine – first impressions

I tested a release candidate of the new Fedora 7, code name Moonshine. As already pointed out, most big changes were under the hood and are not really visible to the user.

Fedora 7 comes along with a pretty impressive set of changes – however, the average user will not see most of them. Especially if he upgrades a highly personalized system like mine and additional runs KDE which traditionally does not get so many improvements in Fedora.

However, some things were notable: First of all several packages are update. The kernel is now tickless and you can start using PowerTop to check for evil processes. Also, my knetworkmanager features a new overview actually displaying the IP and other current information. However, support for additional network types like the new version of NetworkManager provides is not yet included. KDE 3.5.7 is not (yet) included, but k3b is provided in version 1.0. Also, Firefox finally is shipped in version 2.0, as is Thunderbird.
Another notable thing was the fact that I didn’t had to install the ipw2200 firmware: it comes with the distribution now. Very neat.

Also, as promised the device nodes of the IDE drives changed – now all my partitions have /dev/sdX nodes. I had to alter one or two scripts to deal with that, but it also showed me how useful labels are.

Of course, one of the largest changes, the merge of Extras and Core is invisible (despite the missing “core” in the name). First of all because the repository directories are still not opened yet and second because this has no direct effect to the average user. Strange, somehow, because quite a lot of effort went into this change.

And, another big change, the integration of the newest GNOME version, is something I can’t say much about since I hardly use GNOME ever. But you might want to read more about the new version here.

All over all, from the user point of view an evolutionary but very useful step to a new version of Fedora.

Ways to understand the Linux Users – Popcon and Smolt

The Linux user is mainly an unknown species: since you can download your distribution anonymously and everywhere the distributors know almost nothing about their userbase. Due to bittorrent and ftp mirrors even the user numbers are rough estimations at best. However, with Popcon and Smolt two different approaches exist to gather more information about the user base.

Popcon

Popcon is short for popularity contest, as in Debian Popularity Contest. The idea is simple: a small piece of software on the users computer gathers data about the installed software and rough data about the usage of the software (regularly or not at all). These data are send to a central server which collects the data and provides them to everyone interested. All you have to do to participate is to install the popularity-contest package.
And the results speak for themselves: over 50k people participated in the contest and submitted usage information.

Of course, not everyone installed the package, and these who did are most likely more technique affine than the people who didn’t – but the data are still interesting. For example you can check how well your package is adopted and used – or not. And you can gather information if the a specific package you introduced is really used: webmin is installed on over 2k machines – but only used by a couple of hundreds regularly. Instead, clamav is installed on almost 5k machines and is regularly used on almost 3k machines.
Also, you can check for the general popularity of packages: totem is much more popular than Amarok (more Gnome users, I guess), but xine is much more popular than mplayer. And so on…

I must admit that I would love to have such information for Fedora because I would also like to see hints for the adoption of the packages I maintain. But at the moment it is highly unlikely that we will see such information :/

Smolt

What Popcon is for used software is Smolt for the hardware: Smolt collects hardware information from every client participating. With Fedora 7 every user has to decide if s/he wants to take part in the data collection or not, which might increase the number of participants drastically. At the moment the database lists roughly 11k entries.

With these data at your hand you can easily check which kind of hardware is used – and where you put your focus on improved hardware integration and support if you want to please the Linux user base. Also, it might give some hints about what kind of hardware support you can expect.
For example: one third of all machines have 512 MB Ram or less – therefore the distributor should be easy on the Ram. On the other side, on average more than one third of all machines have two or more CPUs/cores. Also, almost half of the installations are marked as Desktop and 20% as Laptop (and 20% as unknown).
But you can also check for the hardware used in one category: the Fedora people tend to use ATI hardware more than NVIDIA hardware.

Besides these hardware information Smolt also gathers basic information about the main system, like the default language, the version of the distribution and so on. This can be pretty important for distributors to have a picture how many people are still using old versions of a distribution and what it will mean when they are forced to upgrade, for example.

Last words

I really hope that it will become normal that all distributions collect information of both types. I would love to see a corporation, but as usual this is unlikely in the short time.
In the meantime, every distribution tries its own way. Ubuntu for example has the Ubuntu Hardware Database – which is seriously broken for month now which is pretty disappointing. But I’m sure they will fix it eventually.

In any case, speaking about statistics, you have to be careful and doubtful every time: since Popcon and Smolt both rely on volunteers you wont have a representative profile of the user base.
Also, gathering numbers might be tricky – for example, Debian’s popcon package was installed by less machines than machines which sent information, and the network device with the largest share among the Smolt users is used by 157.7% of all users…

HelixPlayer news

After almost two years the HelixCommunity updated their pages and gives information about the current development state. The next release can be expected after June this year, but it will not feature AMD64 builds. Still, WMA and WMV seems to work…

Half a year ago I wondered if the HelixCommunity is still alive – the homepage was in large parts outdated and the development seemed to concentrate on other parts than on the players itself.I
I joined the lists and figured out that there was development in place, but without a release schedule at that moment.
Today I checked again the home page and was pleasantly surprised to see a reworked design and new information.

The first impressive information is also a sign that the HelixCommunity does has other priorities than someone might expect: the base technology is more important than the PC players because the base technology is used in more than 125 million devices – mobile phones. Pretty impressive, I think. But: the player for the Symbian OS already features the third generation of the Helix DNA client while even the second generation based HelixPlayer/RealPlayer for the PC is still in development.

But the player development was also straightened and now has a detailed roadmap. The roadmap shows that the work is currently at stage M11. Stage M13 will be reached in June, afterwards we will see the first Beta/RC1 releases which means that we might see a new RealPlayer/HelixPlayer combo this summer.
The roadmap also points out which features have been implemented/tested yet and which not. Among the tested and working features you find WMA and WMV support – I wonder how this works with the Free Software licence the HelixPlayer is released under…

But there are bad news as well: there will be no AMD64 version of the player. These users have to wait for the next generation of the player.
This is sad somehow because I had great hopes with HelixPlayer. I once hoped that it could become *the* multimedia backend for Linux. It would have been nice to have a multimedia backend supported by such a large community and with such a corporate backup. However, this chance has gone by: gstreamer conquered the gnome desktop (and has some corporate backup as well), and as it looks like xine won the hearts of the KDE people silently (amarok, kaffeine, phonon-xine).
And without functional AMD64 builds there will be no way to gain more market share again.