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.

Filed under: fedora, Free Electronic Lab, livedvd

git isn’t my friend yet …

I’ve moved to Antwerpen, Belgium and finally got an internet connection. Luckily, it was just in time for F-10.

Last weekend, Thibault North and I hunted a ghost bug concerning the crash of graal, xpat and other alliance GUI. It was due to a missing requires on xorg-x11-fonts-misc. Thanks Thibault.

Afterwards, the fedora-livedvd-electronic-lab.ks was tuned to “liveuser” and fedora-base-live.ks. By the way, here is a howto create his/her own FEL livedvd. The kickstart file also provide support for certain applications (such as modelsim and cadence icfb) requiring xorg-fonts during ssh sessions. Now, FEL’s livedvd ks, I believe, is frozen and I’ll tend not to touch it again.

While updating the kickstart file for both F-10 and master git branch, I’ve discovered that git isn’t my friend, not yet. I have not fully grasp its mechanism. Well, it is now another thing that reduces my time to spend on electronic design.

Talking about electronic design, I remind you that the goal of FEL is to allow you spending more time in design rather than compiling EDA tools from scratch.

gEDA & gaf were updated to 1.4.1. Gerbv and toped have been updated as well and upstream has done a fantastic job during the recent releases.

I wrote an email to 4 mailing lists describing them, my intention to package FEL applications for EPEL. Till now the following packages are already built for EPEL: ngspice, xcircuit, toped, electronics-menu.

In the next few days, (I thought I could manage to do in one day) I’ll be updating kicad, which I’m co-maintaining with JonCiesla , since we have no news from Alain.

Tonight, we will have a FEL meeting 20h UTC on #fedora-meeting to discuss its roadmap for F-11. After having reached a maturity of about 3 years, FEL is gaining ground and respect from different parties. So for F-11, I guess it will be time for some real project management and weekly meetings.

Filed under: Free Electronic Lab, gEDA, livedvd

Creating his Fedora Electronic Lab livecd

Someone asked me by email, when he will get his FEL livecd ? Well one should be out for F8Test2, following the discussion with Jeremy.

However if one is so eager to get his livecd he/she can spin his own at home:

# yum install livecd-tools –enablerepo=development
# mkdir livecd
# cd livecd
# wget http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/livecd-fedora-electronic-lab.ks
# wget http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/FEL/livecd-fedora-base-desktop.ks
# livecd-creator –config=livecd-fedora-electronic-lab.ks \
–fslabel=Fedora-Electronic-Lab

In about one hour you will have a rawhide based livecd.
Everyday one will be surprised with rawhide. Today it was something good and very professional. It’s the new theme for Fedora 8.

Grub:rhgb:KDE: It is a custom for fedora that just before Test 2, KDE loses its wallpaper. However it keeps up the suspense, how will the new wallpaper look like. Someone has already seen it ?

Filed under: fedora, Free Electronic Lab, livedvd

Livecd for Fedora Electronic Lab

Following the discussion on Fedora Electronic Lab on the Fedora development mailing list, I’ve started creating a livecd for Fedora Electronic Lab this weekend.

Well a few hours ago, livecd-creator ended with a 691 MB image (built from yesterday’s rawhide). It looks great, while my previous trials exceeded 750 MB. That reminds me of kadischi.

Firefox and its dependencies are pulled up. So in this live image, firefox is present. Hopefully soon the directory ownership on its dependencies such zenity might be fixed, thus making room for more applications. Possibly by then, gspiceui and gwave would be on the live image.

Two additional things this live image would have by default:
1. keyboard switch applet on kicker. (I have 2 laptops with 2 different keyboard layouts – fr and de. Believe me I know what’s its like when “us” keyboard layout is by default. I believe this will encourage more users to try the demos from alliance or magic on the livecd and save their data on their usb sticks.)
2. “keep all below” and “keep all above” buttons on the window decorator.

Simply while using graal, xsch and dreal (from alliance), your desktop will be full with windows. Layout editing will be a pain in the neck as one have to keep on shifting windows as you can see in the following screenshot. Having those two buttons will ease the load of stress one might have.

Some work still need to be done in terms of failed services (nscd and avahi till now) upon boot. I haven’t yet tested the Jeremy’s fix for rhgb yet. Currently, there is a live image built going on, while I’m writing. Once it’s completed I’ll post the kickstart file for comments from those on the fedora livecd mailing lists.

Ah yes, I know there was discussions like “whether fedora livecds have gcc on it or not” in the past. Due to lack of space gcc wasn’t included. But on the Fedora Electronic Lab live image gcc will be present.

Filed under: alliance, fedora, Free Electronic Lab, livedvd