Counting Slackware users

zetabill · 07-18-2006, 05:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yalla-One

The only number of Slackware users that count is the number of happy Slackware-users making a significant financial contribution to Slackware Inc. The more we support Pat, the better motivation he has to keep up his excellent work!

-Y1

I agree. I don't think Pat even cares about how many people really use his OS, but he obviously cares about those who offer cash to support it. The people that offer him money that they have no obligation to give are essentially counted already. For those who don't pay for the offical set, maybe something like a link on the website would be a good thing if it matters to anyone. It could also be something like a poll on LQ: Are you a loyal Slackware user? Yes or No?

I'm not sure it really matters. As long as Pat has support behind him, the number of users is just another number. I think that every distribution should have some sort of link to counter.li.org. It's really not too bad of a service as far as counting linux users and linux machines are concerned. I'm sure if it wasn't a minimally decent service, Pat wouldn't have allowed such garbage to be in Slackware's root mailbox.

In that sense I'd say Pat has taken care of the user-count issue.

I personally like being registered with counter.il.org and I think every linux user that is serious about using linux should at least consider registering with it. If for any reason than to make the statement about linux's popularity. It's not the prettiest site out there, but the infrastructure is pretty good, and it doensn't keep your information past a year if you never log in. You don't even have to be all that personal about it either.

I'm interested to see what comes of it, though.

hitest · 07-18-2006, 05:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nykey

Hi, I am pretty courios about this, are Slackware users counted in a way ? If not, anyone knows the reason why Pat didn't add smth to Slack which could count every user ? I'm thinking about a little script, something like pine has, but one that only counts a user 1 time ( i think pine does add the same user installing pine twice like 2 different persons ). Can a script be written which starts after the Slackware install, only once ( even more, after the network is set up properly cause some people don't get it right or can't get it right because of their hardware from the start ) which checks some unique hardware serial's or anything like that, then send the user's info into some setup mail for counting, database or whatever, so if the user should do a reinstall the script first checks if his unique hardware identifier had already been counted and not send and count it again....
I don't know, it really sounds good to me, and wondering why Pat didn't write such a script cause I think he would like to know the number of users using his distro. Maybe he doesn't have the time, maybe it has some special requirements, like a dedicated server for it's database and all the connections the script will do do check if the user is already registered or not and if not add him...
Maybe even someone here, from LQ who has the skills and the time would at least try doing something like this, and who knows maybe we'll see it someday with Slack. Please don't be to harsh if this is a stupid ideea and thing to ask, or if it was already been asked, but I really didn't find anything on this, maybe I just didn't use the right search criterias...who knows. Anyway, replays of all kinds are welcome

I've been registered with the Linux counter for just under four years. I've used RH, Fedora, Iccaros, Knoppix, Suse, FreeBSD, Mandrake, Mandriva, Vector, Caldera, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and Debian.
I'm relatively new to Slack, using since version 10. I think this is a cool idea.

Darksurf · 08-05-2006, 08:10 PM

Yay! Slack Users RULE! I think there should be at least an optional registration. I'm 18 years old and a loyal slack user since 9.0(NOTE:9.0 was the most recent at the time)!!! I've got a girlfriend which we plan on getting married and people think I think and act too old for my age, but look younger than I really am! ha ha

Oh, and the optional registration would help with counting numbers and mabey registered user could get an e-mail of current updates!!

cwwilson721 · 08-05-2006, 08:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Darksurf

Oh, and the optional registration would help with counting numbers and mabey registered user could get an e-mail of current updates!!

It's called ChangeLog.txt.

dosnlinux · 08-06-2006, 07:06 PM

distrowatch sort of does this, or at least they track how many people look at the Slackware page per day. There's also the linux counter: http://counter.li.org/

There's statistics about the distro's people run, and many more statistics about linux users. So if you're really interested in Linux statistics I'd check there first

... and cwwilson721 love the sig