Lat week Fedora’s hardware database hit another psychological mark: more than 50k system are now registered with the database.
Smolt, Fedora’s tool of choice to collect information about uses hardware, showed once again that it has a healthy growth: in the night from Thursday to Friday last week the 50k-users line was crossed.
Unfortunately the devices page is unavailable at the moment so it is impossible to get more detailed statistics about specific hardware parts. Still, the main statistics page still offers some basic information: the main system language is English (no surprise there, this is still Fedora), second is Japanese, third is German (which is a bit more surprising – I thought Open Source is not that popular in Japan?).
And the stats shows – once again – that more than a third of all Fedora users do have two processors or more. So many dual core systems out there…
But besides the raw statistics Smolt itself entered a new level these days: rpms for OpenSuse are now provided. This means that also OpenSuse users can now use Smolt to submit their user data to a central place.
This is interesting because in the beginning Smolt was introduced as a strictly “Fedora only” program, while the supposedly bigger LHCP should create a central place for all distributions. But the last code commit to LHCP was in February and there is not even a rpm for Fedora available.
So with OpenSuse now another distribution is at least covered. I wonder what the plans behind this are – but I would certainly welcome packages for Ubuntu as well!
Imagine Smolt becoming a central place for all hardware information submitted by all Linux distributions. It could help understanding the user. And of course I would like to see Smolt integrating the ability to send information about installed packages, just like Debian’s Popcon.
/home/liquidat 
Smolt wasn’t meant to be Fedora only. We have always encouraged use by other distributions. Other distributions with a Fedora base have submitted data pretty early and there was explicit talks with the OpenSUSE team about adopting smolt and then hopefully get a central website which sends data from all the distributions participating.
LHCP has a wider scope than smolt in that it was initiated to be checking and collecting which hardware works or does not rather than merely collecting hardware profile. However that project is currently stalled.
Hi Rahul,
the homepage of Smolt states:
“Smolt has a very small scope targeting just Fedora and Fedora based OS’s. For more information please see Scope” – sounds pretty much like Fedora only (in the meaning of Fedora and Fedora based distributions, but I took that as granted).
But I would appreciate if OpenSuse would catch on, or even Ubuntu.
You can talk to the Mike Mcgrath and fix that outdated pages. There isn’t anything Fedora specific about smolt. Like I said, Max and others have talked explicitly to SUSE about using smolt.
Devices has been fixed, it’s in testing now.
It works on Debian and Ubuntu, but it needs to be packaged up. Good luck there (the process to do that IMHO is pretty ornerous)
There might even be a port for Crux and an ebuild for gentoo soon 😉
Sounds good so far… I wonder if there had been any talk with the other distribution vendors about integration?
Tried smolt on Mandriva 2007.1. It mostly works except one thing :
– if I launch it as a regular user, the UUID isn’t saved
– if I launch it as root, the UUID isn’t generated at all (it’s blank)
yoho: Strange, try to fill a bug report, maybe its just a smaller problem/bug?
maybe we could point Smolt out to some motiveted ubuntu people !
why not integrate it with popcon. that’s the existing debian tool. 🙂
anonym: Of course that would be an option, but merging such two totally different tools might be more difficult that simply extending one of them.