Slashdot Mirror
The Linux Counter Relaunches
psychonaut writes "Long-term readers of Slashdot may be familiar with The Linux Counter, which attempts to measure (through surveys and statistics) the number of people using GNU/Linux operating systems. The project started in 1993 and shot to fame six years later, largely as a result of three Slashdot articles (two of which brought the Counter to its knees). After four years of stagnation, project founder Harald Tveit Alvestrand has handed over the reins to a new maintainer, Alexander Mieland. Over the past few months, Mieland has completely redeveloped the project, with a modernized design and support facilities (including a bug tracker, mailing list, RSS feed, and Twitter account). The New Linux Counter is now up and running, with all the data for active users from the old counter. The old site will continue to operate for a time but will soon be shut down and requests redirected to the new site."
I have an account and log in once a year, when I get my reminder email. Usually, I have quite a lot to update: decommissioned machines, upgraded machines, new machines and that's only for my personal machines. They have a script which uses sendmail to update your information. That's unacceptable in a desktop setting. What they should have is a simple, but relatively robust update system like freedns.afraid.org uses. If on top of that they can package their updating script and convince major distros to carry it as an opt-in for default installations, it could get some accurate stats.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The project started in 1993 and shot to fame six years later, largely as a result of three Slashdot articles (two of which brought the Counter to its knees)
Here's to keeping the tradition alive!
Anybody want my mod points?
...as long as it works, who cares how many people use it?
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
Maybe not such a great marketing move. I wonder how Microsoft would react to much higher than expected numbers of Linux boxes. In the distant past, Linux was waved off on the desktop side as a hobbyist or novelty platform, but I've seen many of my friends and colleagues switch over to a Linux distro in the past few years for their primary OS.
Of the three computers I have (not including gaming consoles and my phone running linux), all of them are either single, double, or triple boot optioned with a linux distro as one of the options.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
You must be new here
which is totally what she said
"The project started in 1993 and shot to fame six years later, largely as a result of three Slashdot articles (two of which brought the Counter to its knees)"
It's down.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Okay, this counter is ... all about Linux , I get that. But its NOT news worthy. The site is designed pretty crappily as well as the error handling on server load. On top of that, the news summary says 'a modern redesign' of the website.... which still looks like about 2002 era, with some ajax thrown in. That is not modernization of an older concept.
Oh, the beautiful gloss of greality!