Smolt got a new project home page outside the Fedora project, making a step further towards other distributions. Also, KNetworkManager, the KDE tool for NetworkManager, was released in a new development branch which works with the new NM 0.7.
Smolt got a new home
Smolt, the hardware statistics program originally developed for the Fedora project now got a new home outside the Fedora project: smolts.org. This is one further step towards the adoption of Smolt by other distributions: as a real cross distribution tool it the statistics should not be hosted at a distribution specific address. Rahul Sundaram made the announcement and also mentioned that OpenSuse will ship Smolt with the next version of its distribution. Unfortunately he doesn’t mention if it’s activation will be offered during a default installation. And since it is not mentioned I actually doubt it. Still, it is a first step and if everything works out we might see Smolt in the OpenSuse installation routine in future releases.
I hope that other distributions jump on the waggon as well. Especially Ubuntu could benefit the community by offering Smolt during installation time – or by simply providing packages for the people who are interested. And it would be a good way to replace the current Ubuntu Hardware Database which is now broken for months.
Remember that Smolt does not only help to identify which hardware is used by also helps to estimate the amount of Linux users out there.
KNetworkManager devel version for NM 0.7
A pre-release version of NetworkManager (NM) 0.7 was included recently with the Fedora 8 branch to ship NM 0.7 with Fedora 8 final. But unfortunately NM 0.7 broke a set of APIs. While the GNOME gui for NM (nm-applet) was quickly update by the NM guys (who maintain both) the KDE GUI tool (KNetworkManager) developer Helmut Schaa mentioned that he might need some more time to release a 0.7 capable version.
However, only days after that note he released a first development version of KNetworkManager in KDE’s SVN which compiles and works against NM 0.7. This is a great step – keep in mind that Helmut Schaa in the meantime also improved the “old” KNetworkManager to include more support for encrypted enterprise networks.
Of course the new version is still in early development and does not support all features of NM 0.7. Also, there are several regressions due to the port at the moment which will be smoothed out over time. As an example, the configuration of wireless connections is not ready yet, and the VPN and PPP parts are not even started yet. Also, the optimal gui solution for NM’s multiple device support has still to be found. But a first version is out there and I’m very confident that we soon will see fixes and improvements of it.
/home/liquidat 
It isn’t installed by default. Merely made available in the repository. I have updated my blog to clarify this. Of course you are right that I would have mentioned it explicitly had they agreed to install it by default and made it part of their installer.
With “shipped” I just meant that it will be available, not that it will be installed by default. But thanks for pointing out!
The project upstream is still at hosted.fedoraproject.org. smolts.org would be the results of all the gathering.
Jesse, you’re right I wasn’t specific enough about that.