| |||||||||||||
Smolt, Open InvitationSmolt, Open InvitationPosted Jul 17, 2007 9:24 UTC (Tue) by Hanno (guest, #41730)Parent article: Smolt, Open Invitation
"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?
(Log in to post comments)
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.
|
|||||||||||||