| Frequently Asked Questions about DistroWatch |
| Programmes and Sponsorship |
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What is DistroWatch? |
| The DistroWatch web site was first published on 31 May 2001 (you can still find the original page here). The concept started as a very simple table comprising of 5 major distributions and the chart only compared a few features (price, version, release date) and a few package versions (Kernel, KDE, Gnome, XFree86, Apache). Trying to make it slightly more comprehensive and useful (and failing to find anything similar and up-to-date on the Internet), I have kept adding more distributions, features and packages until the table reached fairly reasonable state in terms of information provided. At that stage, I decided to share the table with the Linux community worldwide and moved it from a spreadsheet into an HTML document. The page was first mentioned on LinuxToday and on many other sites around the world. The site has evolved dramatically since its early days - this is what it looked like at the very beginning. Besides visitors, the site has also received a lot of feedback. What follows below is my attempt to answer some of the questions and reply to suggestions. |
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Is the information on your site accurate? |
| It is my objective to provide correct and accurate information. At the same time, I cannot guarantee that every number and every dot is in the correct position, however hard I try. As you can imagine, it is quite tedious to collect all the information and it takes a lot effort and time to wade through busy ftp servers and extract the facts from subdirectories of ISO images. Many errors were fixed soon after the site was first made public (Slackware users were the most active in correcting them) and most of the information should be correct. Don't be shy to point out any errors you find; just send me an e-mail and I will fix them immediately. |
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Some distributions include more than one version of a package. How do you deal with these situations? |
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| Some packages, such as Bash, BIND, GCC, GTK+, Python, Qt, XFree86 and Linux Kernel, are often supplied in multiple versions in some distributions. Including all these versions in the table would destroy its aesthetic qualities and bring potential confusion. Originally, the policy in these situations was to provide only the most current version of a given package. However, as was kindly pointed out to me by Bernhard Rosenkraenzer from Red Hat: "I believe the right think to do is to list the default version instead of the most current one (at least in the Qt case, we're shipping 38 packages that depend on Qt 2.3.x and no packages whatsoever that actually use Qt 3.0 - it's included primarily as a convenience for KDE developers." The trouble is that it is not always easy to figure out which is the "default" version by simply looking at the package list. Nevertheless, I will try to include default packages wherever I can. |
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I've just developed/discovered a new distribution. Will you list it? |
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| Yes, as long as it is based on a version of the Linux Kernel, it qualifies for inclusion. However, please be aware that certain categories of distributions, such as small, embedded, floppy-based and distributions running from Windows partitions are currently excluded. This is mainly due to the fact that I don't have enough time and because of other priorities such as automating site updates. I am sorry if you feel disappointed, but I had to draw the line somewhere.
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The layout of the site looks bad in Netscape 4. |
| Life is full of compromises sometimes. Before implementing Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) on the DistroWatch site, it was OK to use any browser to view the content. But then people started mailing in and saying: "Hey, your pages are too big, load slowly and I only have a metered access over a 56k modem!" So I looked at CSS and suddenly the 150kB page was reduced to less than 50kB. Unfortunately, I started getting mail from Netscape 4 users saying: "Hey, your site looks really bad in my browser!" I tried everything to force Netscape 4 into submission, but it refused and refused...
So whom do I exclude? People using a slow modem connection or people using Netscape 4? Given that there are so many excellent browsers in Linux, I decided to ignore Netscape 4's whims and recommend that people use something else. |
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Any statistics about the visitors' browser and OS usage? |
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| The figures below are by no means representative, as these are figures for a random 100 visitors that were on the site during the specified month. Nevertheless, they give an
indication of browser and OS usage.
August 2001
Browsers:
57% - Internet Explorer
26% - Mozilla (incl Netscape 6 and Galeon)
15% - Netscape (version 4 and below)
02% - Opera
Operating systems:
65% - MS Windows
29% Linux/UNIX
02% Apple Mac
04% Unknown
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August 2002
Browsers:
49% - Internet Explorer
47% - Mozilla (incl Netscape 6/7 and Galeon)
01% - Netscape (version 4 and below)
01% - Opera
01% - Konqueror
Operating systems:
66% - MS Windows
28% - Linux/UNIX
02% - Apple Mac
04% - Unknown
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Any DistroWatch banners for use on my own web site? |
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| Just a few for the time being, more will come soon - as soon as I get the DistroWatch slogan translated into various languages :-)
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What is this "Page Hit Ranking"? |
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| It is a lighthearted way of looking at a popularity of any given distribution. Since each distribution has its own page, I decided to track the number of visitors viewing individual web pages. The HPD figure represents hits per day by unique visitors, the emphasis being on the word unique; the uniqueness is determined by the visitor's IP address. This prevents those visitors, not disciplined enough, from rigging the results by reloading the pages multiple times. The idea is to identify which distributions attract most attention and to rank them accordingly. This also introduces an element of competition and competitions are fun, aren't they? Admittedly, the page clicks by themselves may not always reflect the popularity correctly. They are also "seasonal", meaning that distribution currently in beta testing will often receive much more clicks than the one past the stable release. Also, the more "transparent" distributions such as Debian, Slackware, Mandrake or Red Hat (which let you monitor and even participate in the development process) are likely to get more attention than the ones which develop more or less behind closed doors, such as SuSE. All in all, these numbers should over time provide an indication about the popularity of Linux distributions within reasonable accuracy.
These rules have been implemented to prevent various counter reloading schemes:
- Repeated page and counter reloads in short or regular intervals are not allowed. If you are inclined to set up cronjobs to repeatedly wget your favourite distro's page counter, then please do yourself a favour and go to see a psychologist. You need help.
- All suspicious page hit counts will be investigated and any regularly reloaded counts will be deducted from the total count.
- The offender's entire C-class IP range will be permanently blocked from accessing the counter.
- In future, the offender's IP address and domain name will be published.
- The repeat offender's IP address will be banned from accessing all areas of DistroWatch, including mirrors, for a period of 30 days.
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You list so many distributions. Which one do you use? |
| I have about 15 different distributions installed on my three computers at home, but my current production distribution is Debian (unstable branch) since July 2003. Before that, I used Sorcerer (January 2002 - July 2003) and although I enjoyed the distribution a lot, it really is a high-maintenance source-based distribution and with increasing workload on this web site, I had little time left to tinker with it. Before Sorcerer I was a Mandrake user since the very beginning of my Linux adventures. The reason for my abandoning Mandrake was that I was tired of constantly fighting with RPM dependencies while trying to upgrade to newer versions of packages (although nowadays Mandrake's urpmi does a very decent job, I hear). Having said that, I am grateful for what Mandrake has accomplished -- the only distribution that recognised all hardware in my old notebook -- back in those days when I didn't know how to compile modules into the Linux Kernel. Especially mandrakeuser.org (now neglected, sadly) contributed enormously to my learning process. Also, in my last job, I used Debian exclusively as my workstation and the company's all four servers, which I administered, were running various versions of Red Hat Linux. |
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Who has been helping with translations and logo/banner design? |
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| Parts of the site are slowly being translated into other languages and if you would like to help with translations to your own language, please email me. My big "thank you for your help" goes to the following volunteer translators:
Albanian - Albert Hyseni, Flori
Arabic - Ossama Khayat
Chinese Simplified - Zhu Wen Tao
Chinese Traditional - Hsieh Yung Hsin
Bosnian - Dino Fahrudin Avdibegovic
Croatian - Dominko Aždajić
Czech - Misu
Danish - Francois Thunus, Jens H. Kruuse
Dutch - Eric Roosendaal
Finnish - Pasi Ruhanen
French - Patrick Legault, David Sibai
German - Silvio Costa, Thomas Blechinger
Greek - Kostas Tsakaloglou
Hebrew - Offer Kaye
Hungarian - Christian Hamar
Indonesian - Ronald Kuwawi
Italian - Luigi Maselli
Japanese - Daisuke Suzuki (Project Vine and Japan Linux Association)
Korean - Thomas Chung (LinuxInstall.org), Yeuri, Jong Woong Lee
Lithuanian - Andrius Kurtinaitis
Polish - Stanislaw
Portuguese - Oliver Zancul Prado, Luis Fonseca Carvalho De Matos
Romanian - Florin Veres, Ghita "Zamo" Serban (Team 1337)
Russian - Michael Shigorin (Alt Linux)
Serbian - Andrej Lukács
Slovak - Misu
Spanish - adrian15
Swedish - Per Lindström
Thai - N. S.
Turkish - VahapDEMiR
Vietnamese - Larry Nguyen
If you wish to translate parts of DistroWatch into your language, please click here for further information.
The DistroWatch banner was designed by MadHunter from MadPenguin.org.
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Can you tell us about yourself? Where are you from? |
| Not sure any more. I was born in Czechoslovakia, I am a citizen of South Africa and I live in Taiwan. My professional career has so far consisted of nuclear research in Czechoslovakia, platinum mining in South Africa, diamond mining in Namibia and software development in Taiwan. I am a relative newcomer to Linux, having attempted my first ever installation of a Linux operating system in April 1999. The Chinese say:"A one-thousand mile journey starts with a single step." Those first steps were not very easy, but the journey itself has been full of pleasant surprises, even joys and, most importantly, it has been a journey of freedom. Linux is great and this site is just a small contribution to all who enjoy it. |
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Contact details |
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Name: Ladislav Bodnar
Physical Address: 8F, No 54, Anchung Rd, 231 Hsintien, Taiwan
Telephone: +886 2 2211-9570 (home/office), +886 921 034681 (cell)
E-mail: distro at distrowatch.com
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| Quick Summary |
News Headlines
http://www.distrowatch.com/news/dw.rdf
http://www.distrowatch.com/news/dw.xml
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Latest Packages
http://www.distrowatch.com/news/dwp.rdf
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| LWN.net Weekly Edition |
LWN Weekly Edition
11 March 2003
- Front: A Grumpy Editor's Calendar Search; Componentized Linux; SCO and public perception.
- Security: Fighting spam in the courts; New vulnerabilities in kdelibs, mozilla, python, wu-ftpd, ....
- Kernel: Virtual memory special; No more global queue unplugging.
- Distributions: A First Look at Mandrakelinux 10.0; Trustix Secure Linux 2.1; FreeSBIE; ROCK 2.0
- Development: The BitTorrent File Copying Tool,
new versions of alsa-lib, PostgreSQL,
KDE, GNOME Platform Bindings, SQL-Ledger, GTK+,
GenChemLab, Epiphany, AbiWord, BloGTK, Tcl/Tk, Bugzilla.
- Press: Spam anniversary, Cell phone programming, Microsoft And SCO,
EU cracks down on piracy, Inside TLDP, Next-Generation File Sharing.
- Announcements: Desktop Linux Conf, developerWorks Live, GIMP 2.0 User Manual,
Python tutorial, Penguicon, Halloween X.
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