FEL download metrics

Fedora Electronic Lab made its 4th consecutive release last month. It was first release along side Fedora 8 and was well accepted by the community, universities and small companies. There were a lot of challenges on the road and below are some metrics accompanied by my analysis.

Number of FEL Livedvd downloaded

When FEL8 was released, many people thought of it as a fork or independent of the Fedora Project. At that time, only the 32 bit architecture was supported as a livecd. It is however very surprising to see the number of downloads for FEL8, as this first release mostly included tools to satisfy user ‘ME’. It seems that this became the backbone of the following development.

6 months later, FEL9 came out, its development cycle was affected by lack of time to promote it,due to the fact I was working on an exciting project for ON Semiconductor. The number of additional packages included was roughly 10%. FEL9 was provided for both 32 bit and 64 bit architectures. It was also that period I had to justify my choice for a KDE desktop environment, since KDE4 was still one-month baby. Many users emailed me requesting for Gnome desktop environment instead, and many switched to Gnome to take full advantage of what Fedora developers are providing (power management, bluetooth, virtualisation,..). At the same time, users understood the FEL Livedvd is nothing more than Fedora, and not a fork.

When FEL10 was released, FEL8 reached End-Of-Life. Those who didn’t upgraded to FEL9, went straight to FEL10 by making full use of “yum” to install FEL apps. Many users (especially those from universities) requested http downloads for FEL10 Livedvd. Thibault North provided the Livedvd on his personal website, for which I am very grateful. However I don’t have his metrics, so it was not accountable on this histogram. As per Thibault North’s comment, we now have download metrics from march09 to june09. These values are now listed on the histogram. Since FEL provides multiple design flows which may not be useful if someone is interested into one design flow, FEL users seem to have customized their Fedora install to satisfy their needs. This is very promising as it seems they have understood that it is all about design methodologies rather than random packages. Again, I was confronted with the KDE versus Gnome for desktop environments and users were eager to #yum groupinstall’ all the FEL apps. LiveUSB was another cool feature that users preferred over the livedvd as their data can be stored on the media.

The metrics I have for FEL11 are for the following timeframe:

• torrent: 9th June to 1st July
• http download (data from mmcgrath) : 23rd June to 1st July – for both 32 bit and 64 bit

FEL11 now has a http download from alt.fedoraproject.org, together with a groupinstall from yum. In accordance to Mike McGrath, there were ~160 downloads from the alt.fedoraproject.org from ~110 different IPs. The boot time and power resources of KDE were severely criticized by FEL users, since Fedora claims a boot time of 20 seconds and better power management. I have to thank RexDieter who worked hard to improve the KDE launch time when FEL11 Beta was released. FEL11 was released 3 weeks ago.

Number of gigabytes of FEL Livedvd downloaded

The above histogram reflects the number of gigabytes transferred via torrent only.

I am very happy of the results. You might interpret it as you like. However from my point of view, if FEL users are using it per design flow requirements, our goals are being met and FEL users are not blindly installing everything. The metrics reflect the minimum threshold of downloads for Fedora Electronic Lab. Those universities and small companies who are deploying more that 1 FEL node are also not accountable in those histograms. The support of EPEL repositories was greatly appreciated as well. Some people are even rebuilding the SRPMs for ScientificLinux. For more details about Fedora downloads, visit the Statistic wikipage.

References:

• Metrics : Torrent files
• Metrics : http download via alt.fedoraproject.org: Mike McGrath
• Thibault North’s comment on this post.

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Filed under: fedora, Free Electronic Lab, livedvd