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Smolt, Open Invitation
Smolt will reach 75,000 profiles in the next 24 hours and with that news I'm excited to announce functional clients that work in SuSE, Debian, and Ubuntu. With the help of the Linux community at large we could start to better understand what is out there. Look to changes in the near future like a ratings system, better reporting tools and other such improvements. But we need your help! We would like knowledgeable contributors help with our code base, especially in the scope of packaging the smolt client for SuSE, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandrake, you name it. We're hoping Smolt will grow far beyond being just a "Fedora" thing and become a "Linux" thing. If you are a member of another community and are interested in collaboration please let me know, if you know someone that might be interested, tell them! Current Stats - http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/ Project Page - https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/smolt/ -Mike P.S. If you haven't submitted your profile please do so with "yum install smolt && smoltSendProfile" Thanks! -- fedora-announce-list mailing list fedora-announce-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-announce-list (Log in to post comments)
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 9:24 UTC (Tue) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link] "Smolt is a basic hardware profiler. Its intended to be a profiler to get automated information from users. This should make it easier for our developers to do what they need to do."
Uhm. But what does it actually do?
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 14:08 UTC (Tue) by johnkarp (subscriber, #39285) [Link] You can see the stats at:http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/
They seem to track usage of various architectures, kernel versions,
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 14:23 UTC (Tue) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link] Looks impressive.
I'm a Ubuntu user myself (on the desktop) -- though I'm unsure if they have something similar.
I know they collect stats on packages installed (it helps work out the 'popularity' for Add/Remove Programs.
Unsure if they actually collect 'machine info'.
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 19:33 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] Is that all? Then I could just go on using http://klive.cpushare.com/
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 21:32 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Did you even bother to look at http://smolt.fedoraproject.org? It collects way more information than just the kernel version. Not comparable really.
Smolt, Open Implication Posted Jul 18, 2007 6:31 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] Well, it's exactly in RH style to consider themselves "Linux", things done there neccessarily "for the first time in the world", and whatever weird project name they come up with must be already familiar to the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world can do Linux too, in many cases better and faster than RH, and seems would rather like to read in an "open invitation message" a few intro words for the next buzzword :)
HTH
Smolt, Open Implication Posted Jul 18, 2007 7:16 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
Not sure what's your point if you really have any. What smolt is has clearly been described in multiple places including a lead in this news item. See http://lwn.net/Articles/241875/rss. You can always click on the links in the invitation to read more about it. There has no claim to be the first in the invitation though I haven't seen other distributions do similar things and provide the stats transparently as Fedora Project does.
Smolt, Open Implication Posted Jul 19, 2007 16:38 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] *sigh*. Spelling the point: "it doesn't matter that something's clearly described in a few places if it's not even paid a few words in the very beginning of the announce message." Since it seems like intended for wider audience than those with inherent knowledge of Fedora-related subproject names.In case you're not sure about this being a point, I can e.g. sort of announce hasher(7) and imply that everyone has already read the manual page to realize how much the projects they contribute to need this software packaged. Here's the link. PS: the more ranting part was mostly related to F7 release announce which got me wondering if those writing bold stuff ever look around; particularly, there were complete free isolated build systems available ages before Fedora "invented" their own, that is since 2001 at the very least. Don't take it as a personal blame though, it's just a (narrow) corporate mindset. Still Truth Happens (TM). :-)
Smolt, Open Implication Posted Jul 19, 2007 16:59 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] Fedora folks are already talking to several distributions about Smolt and it has been described in detail many times including this news item. If you aren't yet aware, clicking on the first click would show you what you want to know. Maybe every announcement about it should include a short blurb but no harm done now.
Koji, the new build system in Fedora and has been used in the project internally in a slightly different form for several releases before being opened up and made public. Familiarity is important to those who work with the project and the build system does have several unique features which the project takes advantage of. It builds on existing software like Yum and mock. It is not the first one and probably wont be the last one. It is not specific to corporations to believe that they can get better value in starting a new project. Let the market decide.
The release announcement highlighting the ability to remix and do custom spins of Fedora was related to the tools like pungi, live cd tools and revisor rather than the build system. Slashdot just got that wrong.
See http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2007/05/31/remixing-fedora-7/ for details.
Y'know, I looked at that myself... Posted Jul 17, 2007 18:56 UTC (Tue) by kmself (subscriber, #11565) [Link] ... and best I could tell smolt seems to hit dmidecode (and exposes the cavalier lack of manufacturer dilligence in providing useful information thereby), /proc/cpuinfo, and /proc/meminfo (or 'free'). Not a whole lot else immediately evident in the stats. While profiling is useful, showing what specifically you're profiling, what your code does, etc., is somewhat more useful. I've long used my own shell script consisting largely of a "here" document to capture similar data for system information from various sources (/proc, system commands, dmidecode, lshw, si, etc, if installed), conveniently called system-info, with a sample report here.
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 19, 2007 10:05 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] Very little.
There's obviously a need for a system that as far as possible automates the collection of information about what hardware people own (in aggregate) and whether it actually works.
A project like Smolt should be great for answering questions like
* There's no driver for my PCI device 8086:4224 on my system, what distro or kernel version can I upgrade to which does have such a driver ?
* I want to buy a DVB-T dongle for use in Fedora. I'd rather have something lots of people already use so I don't have to be a guinea pig. What's a popular model of USB DVB-T dongle among Fedora users ?
* I need a project, there must be lots of web cams that don't work yet, which is the most popular USB web cam attached to Linux systems for which no-one has a driver?
But so far Smolt isn't that, it's just a scaled up version of "Hey, hands up who in the office has more than 2GB of RAM? And who has a Pentium 4? OK, so more Pentium 4 machines. Thanks" I can imagine it's useful to Red Hat up to a point for planning, but to me as a user and developer it's a disappointment every time I see it mentioned and find it hasn't improved.
As someone else stated, right now the most interesting result from Smolt is that so many people run VMware, and so few vendors actually even bother to put their names on the things they sell - their marketing people would have heart attacks.
Nick.
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 14:57 UTC (Tue) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link] It would be nice if the LWN editor who posts a story would include an explanatory phrase or sentence explaining what the proper names in the story refer to. For example, what is "smolt"?
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 15:16 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link] You mean like, "Smolt is a hardware profiling tool used by Fedora to get automatedinformation from users who opt-in." ?
Read the front-page summary.
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 14:58 UTC (Tue) by zooko (subscriber, #2589) [Link] Smolt is very cool! There are all sorts of weird nuggets of (mis?) information in here. For example, the most popular computer manufacturer on which to run Fedora is apparently "VMware".
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 16:21 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] Geeky nitpick -- not the most popular, since 92% are running something else.
*sigh* Posted Jul 18, 2007 6:36 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] Nitpicking on a (faulty) nitpick: not "since 92%" but "since 12.1%".But yes, original comment alone would leave me thinking it was rather ~50%. :)
*sigh* Posted Jul 18, 2007 9:01 UTC (Wed) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link] The original comment is perfectly accurate - 'most popular' simply meansmore popular than any other single option, not more popular than everything else put together.
If he'd said 'most people run on VMware' he'd have been wrong, but he
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 19, 2007 10:16 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] From my reading, the most popular manufacturer is "System manufacturer", with 12%. I guess most Fedora users build their own systems, rather than relying on an OEM to do it for them.
"VMWare, Inc." comes in second at 8%.
Also notable is "To Be Filled By O.E.M.", and its infamous rival, "To Be Filled By O.E.M. by More String". I'm surprised the latter features so highly in the results, given that it is currently unable to ship any of its products due to an injunction from the former citing trademark infringement.
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 17, 2007 23:54 UTC (Tue) by jitz0722 (guest, #46310) [Link] Yes, there is smolt, and I have sent a few profilesin, so now why is there hardware4linux.org??
What is the difference between the two??
Regards
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 18, 2007 5:48 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
hardware4info was a effort from a person at Mandriva who left to Intel and the project seems to have stalled. You basically have to run a command and manually upload the results while smolt is actively maintained and makes it very easy to send results back.
I am in touch with Mandriva in discussions about them adopting smolt. Hopefully we have a more universally adopted solution.
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 18, 2007 16:57 UTC (Wed) by fred (guest, #14141) [Link] What make you think that http://hardware4linux.info/ is stalled ? It's actively maintained and has very active users.
Thanks,
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 18, 2007 17:34 UTC (Wed) by jitz0722 (guest, #46310) [Link] so cannot harware4linux and smolt work together. ( as one??? )-Not sure we need both as each wants to cover all the Linuxes.
Is there a reason for the fragmentation??
Regards
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 18, 2007 19:30 UTC (Wed) by fred (guest, #14141) [Link] Competition is always good ;-) Having said that I think we could work together. Is the Smolt database available somewhere ? I would need to check if both are compatible. OTOH the thing I don't like about Smolt is the dependency on python, dbus, hal and gtk to collect the hardware info...
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 18, 2007 20:58 UTC (Wed) by jitz0722 (guest, #46310) [Link] Hi:
I personally am not involved with smolt. I like the idea of there
Other than that this is the Contact of the person
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MikeMcGrath
Regards and good luck
Smolt, Open Invitation Posted Jul 18, 2007 17:36 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
That was the information I got. Smolt has nearly 80000 profiles while the total amount of systems registered is in the low hundreds for example.
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