Agust produced a beautiful wallpaper for Celena and we will use it as the default one:

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.

I just read this article from Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols:

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS5155657721.html

The reason I went to read the article in the first place is because it promised to give more information about the number of people using Linux.. did Steven tell us anything about that? No. Here’s one more of these empty articles with marketed titles.

Nonetheless, the article does talk about something interesting: a new desktop tool aimed at counting users and making statistics. “Great”, I thought. Even better, Steven talks about its integration within the distributions and how a unified strategy could help us all. Things were really starting to get interesting and as I was starting development on Celena I thought “why not try and add that new tool, I just added AptOnCD, this kind of stuff would definitely be a plus for the new release”.

So I clicked on the “Statix” link and arrived on its sourceforge project page. I couldn’t find any files to download, no website (well, no content at least), nothing… I checked the date of registration of the project on sourceforge, the whole thing was 4 days old.

So here’s my rant. Thank you Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for wasting my time. I hope the Statix project does well and if it doesn’t I hope that idea grows and produces something of the sort. When ready we’ll look at it with interest and we will include it in Linux Mint. In the meantime I really don’t understand why such an article was published, the project is not ready, the article has no content, we’re basically talking about something that doesn’t exist. It’s amazing how a famous writer can make so much noise out of nothing.

I’ll keep an eye on Statix in the months to come. The idea deserves to be implemented. If the project goes nowhere and no other similar project was started I’ll start coding my own implementation.