Thursday, January 1, 2009

Smolt

Smolt caught my interest on the spot, although still in development and with rough edges, it looks promising.

It is project aimed to collect anonymously and completely voluntarily hardware data from computers running Linux. There is many advantages of such collection. It is originally a Fedora project, but they posted open invitation to everyone on LWN.net . Smolt is now included in openSUSE distribution, and if it is not installed then:

# zypper install smolt
or
$ sudo zypper install smolt

will do the job.
Note that # is prompt for superuser, and $ is for ordinary user.
OpenSUSE is using > as a normal user prompt.

For now there is usability bug in GUI.
GUI version doesn't give option to give comment how hardware device works, instead user has to go to Smolt web page enter password and edit profile there. but GUI doesn't give that password.

Workaround is to use command line version.

$ smoltSendProfile
or
$ smoltSendProfile -d

Second one should be more verbose.

Getting tired

After 3 years being very active with openSUSE, my activity went down. Comparing with previous time, activity is almost zero.

After few attempts to sort wiki articles, to make it accessible for new users, I'm tired and not willing for another undertake. It is just too much for a single person even with 8 hours a day just for that. Maybe one day when some of programs that should handle indexing will work better, but manually, no thanks.

I'll take only Portal page and see how it will develop.
That would be reasonable amount of work. A bit of graphic, links with digest, one special article given with larger excerpt as a article of the month, some that look like a portal, as portal of the month.

It would be manually selected articles that is worth reading.