After I read that article from Steven I saw that Statix wasn’t even started I decided to have a look at Fedora’s similar project: Smolt.

It comes as 2 RPM packages (one for the program itself and one for a pygtk GUI). I aliened them into DEB without any problem. There were a few incompatibilities so I had to install python-urlgrabber and uuid. I changed the occurences of sys.err.write to print in the code and used commands.getoutput(“/usr/bin/uuidgen”) to get the UUID in smolt.py, but after this was done Smolt was functional.

Of course the next step would be to package it properly, contact the devs and ask them if it’s ok for Mint to send info to their server via Smolt.. give them the diffs and all. I don’t intend to add Smolt to Linux Mint just quite yet though. I just wanted to see if it was possible. And it is… and it’s quite easy in fact.

Linux Mint will participate in getting better stats about Linux users. I don’t know whether it’ll be through Smolt, through Statix or through something else, but it will happen.

That’s it from me about this. I’ll be waiting for more news about Statix and other distros. We might talk about this again in October when we get things ready for Linux Mint 4.0.