At the Red Hat Summit last year, I had a chance to speak to a camera crew about how I got started in Linux, and my Fedora MirrorManager project, which distributes Fedora content to millions of users worldwide. Now it’s a video in their “Spotlight On” series.
http://magazine.redhat.com/2009/02/27/video-spotlight-on-mirror-manager/
Smolts.org is an open source project started by the fabulous Mike McGrath, Fedora Infrastructure leader, which lets users opt-in to provide information about their hardware and OS. Perhaps you’ve seen the opportunity during Fedora‘s firstboot to submit your hardware profile, and wondered what that was.
Fedora firstboot smolt screenshot
Users can use the statistics gathered by smolt to see which systems are popular, and to rate and see the ratings other users give. The Dell Latitude D630 currently shows as the top-rated name-brand system, noting that everything “just works” – just like I like it.
Smolt statistics can also be used to influence companies to invest in Linux. I’m pleased to see Dell ranked as the most popular system vendor listed (see Vendor tab). This isn’t simply people expressing their opinion and wishes, but people voting with their wallets. This reflects the commitment I and my teams have made for the last 10 years to ensure Linux “just works” wherever we can.
Smolt Vendor List
Smolt is available for Fedora, Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS, openSUSE, and perhaps your other chosen distribution as well. If not, visit the project page (above) to help include it.
Got a good idea, and are looking for the perfect audience to present it to? This year there are a lot of choices in North America. This list isn’t complete, but is just a taste of the speaking opportunities available.
Note: many have proposal deadlines this month, even though the events are 6 months away. So get cracking now…