Smolt (Linux)

Smolt was a computer program used to gather hardware information from computers running Linux, and submit them to a central server for statistical purposes, quality assurance and support. It was initiated by Fedora,^[1] with the release of Fedora 7,^[2] and soon after it was a combined effort of various Linux projects. Information collection was voluntary (opt-in) and anonymous.^[3] Smolt did not run automatically. It requested permission before uploading new data to the Smolt server. On 2012-10-10 it was announced that smolt would be discontinued on 2013-11-01.^[4] That is now in effect. Server http://www.smolts.org responds only with message that Smolts project is retired.

General

Before Smolt there was no widely accepted system for assembling Linux statistics in one place. Smolt was not the first nor the only attempt, but it is the first accepted by major Linux distributions.

Collecting this kind of data across distributions can:

aid developers in detecting hardware that is poorly supported
focus efforts on popular hardware
provide workaround and fix tips^[5]
help users to choose the best distribution for their hardware
convince hardware vendors to support Linux

Getting Smolt

Smolt was included in:

Fedora
openSUSE, releases from 11.1 to 12.2;^[6]^[7]
RHEL and CentOS see http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/
Gentoo see http://packages.gentoo.org/package/app-admin/smolt
MythTV see http://smolt.mythtv.org/

Smolt server

The smolt server, at http://www.smolts.org/, stored all collected data.

External links

References