Having written about a few methods of measuring popularity, including Torrents, Google Trends and Distrowatch Rankings I felt that I could try and draw some conclusions from all the data collected.

The most important part is that there isn’t really a reliable method of measuring distro popularity, as it cannot be directly measured, the only possible methods are indirect. A good way would be to get the statistics from a huge, popular site (such as Google or Facebook) and compare the user agent string. However, some distros don’t announce themselves like this, so it isn’t really a good measure either.

However, since this method isn’t available to me anyway, I had to go with some methods that were. None of these are reliable at all though. Distrowatch rankings are open to easy manipulation using automated scripts. The site itself isn’t representative of the whole Linux userbase either, with a few of the comments on my article about it calling it for Linux newbie’s.

Google Trends uses the volume of searches for a keyword. Due to the way that people google things, you can get twitter being more popular than God, and facebook more popular than sex, so in these terms, it really isn’t very good at all.

Using Linux tracker for the torrents is the most direct method of measuring popularity, but still is pretty poor. Most people will use HTTP downloads. A smaller proportion will use the official torrents and an even smaller amount will use the Linux tracker ones. Bit torrent also tends to cater for the more technically aware users, which will distort the figures further.

A fairly clear conclusion that can be drawn is that Ubuntu is the more popular distro. Most of the statistics point to this. Less clear is the 2nd most popular. Distrowatch says Linux Mint. Google Trends says Debian. Linux Tracker says Debian for one and Fedora for the second. Overall then, I’d go for Debian being the second most popular. If you consider that Ubuntu is based upon Debian, this would actually make Debian the most popular distro by far as you could count all the Ubuntu installations, all the Ubuntu installations, all the Ubuntu-based distros installations and all the Debian-based installations. Fedora would then be my choice third most popular.

Attempting to go any further than 3rd gets even murkier than before, so I’m not going to bother. I do stress that this is by no means absolute truth, and my conclusions could be completely wrong. Don’t forget I’m simply playing with very unreliable data for fun here, so don’t take this too seriously.

Another way of measuring popularity is to look at the number of seeders and leechers a torrent has (the number of people uploading/downloading the torrent at that moment) and the number of downloads it has had.

While the only takes a smaller fraction of the downloads, as most people prefer to use HTTP downloads. These will also cater to the slightly more technically aware, as downloading via bit torrent is not quite as simple as downloading via HTTP. Another issue is that it is possible (and encouraged) for one person to be seeding multiple torrents at once, so someone could be seeding every single Ubuntu torrent on the site, even though it is only 1 user. Conversely someone could have downloaded the disc straight and then not seeded it at all. Projects with lots of DVDs/CDs (such as Ubuntu and Debian) will have more seeders together than a project with only 1 or 2 CDs.

Ranking the site by seeders:

On a small side note, this makes a change from the other 2 methods in that they are averages over a period of time, whereas this is a snapshot of a moment in time, as the number of seeders and leechers will change from minute to minute.

As is the norm, Ubuntu is at the top of the list, although not the standard edition you would expect. In fact it is the AMD64 version. Coming next is the Debian DVDs. This is slightly more expected, as Debian has a large number of DVDs to contain all of its packages, which take up a vast amount of storage space. Since the project does not have a commercial backer, using bit torrent to shift its discs around is a great advantage as it will conserve their bandwidth.

Adding up all of the seeders for a few distros:

In a pretty graph:

(There were more distros but they only had 1 disc with a few seeders that wasn’t really worth mentioning)

Looking at the graph, as usual Ubuntu has a clear majority, with Debian in second, CentOS is third and Fedora in 4th.

Alternatively we can look at the amount of completed downloads. While this is over a time period rather than a snapshot, it is over the time the torrent has been on the site rather than a fixed period, so older torrents will have more downloads comparitivley than newer ones.

As you can see, listed like this there are small amounts of seeders for most torrents, and they are quite old, but they have a large amount of downloads. Fedora dominates here by quite a measure, and Ubuntu is hardly represented at all.

Adding up the totals:

In a pretty graph:

Looking at the graph, Fedora has a similar majority to Ubuntu in the seeders. OpenSUSE pulls in a safe 2nd, with Knoppix in 3rd and Mandriva in 4th. Ubuntu barely has any downloads in comparison.

A big issue with these is that some distros have their own bit torrent tracker for the official images (like Ubuntu) while others don’t so they could use Linux tracker, or another solution like Open Bittorrent.

If you look at the official Ubuntu torrent, it only has 196 seeders, which is much less than the Linux tracker one.

All in all, I don’t think this is a massively accurate method of measuring distro popularity. Its probably more accurate than Google Trends but less so than the Distrowatch rankings, which aren’t all that accurate either.

Again, like the distrowatch rankings, you shouldn’t take these too seriously. After all they are open to manipulation, and they aren’t a direct measure of the amount of distro installs.

A more difficult distro to use (such as Arch) may get more google’s than a distro that is designed to run smoothly with no configuration. However, in reverse, distro’s that are more aimed at Linux beginners (such as Ubuntu) will probably get more google’s than a distro aimed at expert users (such as Slackware) so maybe the 2 will balance each other out?

There is also the issue that a distro with a generalised name (such as Mint) will definately have some google’s that are nothing to do with the distro whatsoever. Luckily there aren’t that many distro’s like that, but to attempt to get rid of this effect I’m going to use the name that relates to Linux (e.g. Linux Mint, Arch Linux) for the ambigious distro’s.

Sadly trends will only allow 5 comparisons at once, and its comparisons are relative.

So, first, the 5 most popular distro’s according to distrowatch? Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, openSUSE and PCLinuxOS.

As usual, Ubuntu has a clear majority. It also has increasing amounts of google’s as time goes on. Fedora is in second place, although according to this it is in decline. OpenSUSE just about has enough google’s to be registered and the other two are not registered. Looking more closely at these last 3.

Here you can see that Linux Mint and PCLinuxOS do actually exist in Google’s eyes, but not compared to Ubuntu’s search rankings. Still they only have a fraction of the googles of OpenSUSE, which only has a fraction of the googles of Ubuntu.

Going back to the bigger distro’s, lets try the bigger ones with an established developer network: Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, Slackware and Fedora.

All of these have registered. Ubuntu is still the most popular by a clear majority, but Debian is shown to have slightly more than Fedora. Slackware and Mandriva are running fairly equal. Fedora and Debian seem to be in slight decline while Slackware and Mandriva have remained fairly stable.

Looking at Slackware and more advanced distro’s generally, we get some interesting results for Slackware, Arch, Sidux and Gentoo.

Gentoo is the most popular by a large majority. Slackware is next in the middle and Arch is very low at the bottom. Looking at this slightly more zoomed-in scale, you can see that Slackware and Gentoo are actually in decline.

Overall, you probably should take these graphs with even more salt than the Distrowatch rankings. After all this graph does say a lot.

It indicates that Windows is more popular than Mac’s and Linux by a 3x margin, when in fact it has about 89% of the market. Mac OSX by itself has at least twice the market share of Linux, yet here it is roughly equal.

All in all then, using Google trends is an interesting exercise to play with numbers and pretty graphs, but shouldn’t really be trusted in the real world.

A well used method is the Distrowatch rankings. This simply measures the visits on each distro page on the site every day. While not a direct measure of popularity, it can be used as an insight. For instance, the usual candidates (e.g Ubuntu, Debian, Mandriva, Open Suse, Fedora) are at the top, and the less popular distros (e.g. WattOS) are towards the bottom.

Over a longer period of time, Ubuntu is king with a healthy margin. However, looking at a closer period of time, its page views have dropped and in the past 7 days, Linux Mint and Fedora has taken it over. Arch has also gained a few places over a short period of time.

Mint’s last release was 14th May. Arch’s was 17th May. Fedora’s was 25th May. Ubuntu’s was 30th April. The more current releases will cause a spike in the short term visits as people are more likely to visit the page, especially from the links in the release announcements. However, the longer term rankings negate this effect.

These rankings should not be used as gospal truth, they should only be used for fun like we’re using them for, I really wouldn’t use them for a proper report (You could do the same as the recording industry and make figures up on the spot if you like though)

Installer

Booting the Live CD up, immediately a fairly worrying error occured.

It then showed a Live CD desktop, from which the installer could be launched. This isn’t a critical bug, but it could be rather scary to a first time user.

After the error, the installer is the usual Ubuntu one. Simple to use, and fairly quick. It took about 15 minutes to install Lucid, during which time all of the standard Ubuntu features were available via the Live CD.

Installed System

The new system was speedy, booting up and shutting down in about 12 seconds, not far off the aim of 10 seconds on our test PC. It was taking about 30 seconds to show the desktop background though (Possibly due to a hardware incompatibility – I used a Solid State Disk). It was otherwise responsive.

The New Ubuntu Interface

Features

Quite a few changes have been made to the previous line up of installed applications. GIMP (Image Editor) has been banished to the repositories to free up space on the Live CD. Canonical were also concerned that it’s interface was not easy to use. It’s a pity to see it go, but I can understand why.

Many of the default games have also been removed and replaced by gbrainy. This doesn’t really compliment the existing games, as it is uninspiring to play and has some issues. For example when it asked you to complete ‘Glass – break, paper – ?’ it rejected the answer ‘rip’ and gave the correct answer as ‘rips’.

A number of applications have been added, such as the brilliant Simple Scan, which allows you to scan in multiple pages and create PDFs from them.

PiViTi video editor has also been added. While I didn’t have any video clips to play around with, it looks like an excellent addition to the media side of Ubuntu, where simple movies can be quickly made.

However, a still noticeable omission is that of the media codecs – Ubuntu will still not play mp3 files out of the box, which is disappointing for those of us without an internet connection. Considering Canonical has done a deal with 7Digital to allow the purchase of MP3 files from Rhythmbox, its a shame that they haven’t given you the codecs to play them. DVD playback is also not supported although you can use this Guide to Playing Encrypted DVDs to enable DVD playback by installing proprietary codecs.

A less useful application now bundled with Ubuntu is Gwibber (Unless you’re sad and use Twitter. http://twitter.com/jjtcomputing/). This has absolutely no use apart from allowing you to tweet with increasing effectiveness. While Twitter is a very popular service, I can’t see the use of bundling a Twitter client with Ubuntu when they’ve kicked out far more useful applications (or even just games)

Hardware

Most of our test PC’s hardware worked fine, except for USB sticks, which didn’t pop up on the desktop. However, they could be accessed from the Computer. My broadcom wireless card still requires the STA driver to be installed.

Appearance

The new interface is very pretty, and has definately taken inspiration from OSX. Compiz is still bundled in by default and apart from the shiny theme it is pretty much a standard GNOME desktop. However, for some reason the window buttons have been moved to the left. I’m really not a fan of this, as it gives no real advantage from them being on the right, and means that Ubuntu is different to most other Linux distros, and Windows.

Overall

This is another good edition of Ubuntu that brings in some excellent features, some gimicky. However, certain issues, such as playing encrypted DVDs and Broadcom drivers still haven’t been fixed, despite other distros having solved these problems a long time ago. I’m not a fan of the removal of many of the games, and GIMP, although the addition of Simple Scan and PiViTi is certainly a good idea.

The most noticable thing, is the theme change. Ubuntu has gone from the friendly brown to a far more clean interface,
now using a theme called ‘light’ rather than the older Human one. Its definately a step forward for Ubuntu, but I’m not a fan of certain parts, such as the movement of the window buttons to the left.

It is something you get used to, especially since I’ve been using the netbook interface for a while, and so I’ve been used to having no window buttons at all. Still, I’m not convinced its a good idea.

While there has been a lot of hype about this new theme, it is just a theme and can be changed easily with one of the thousands available from gnome-look.org or similar.

In this release of Ubuntu there has been a lot of changes for the user. Canonical has switched from Google being the default search provider to Yahoo.

Ubuntu One integration has increased massively, with options on the taskbar and in the file browser options menu to send files to and fro the cloud service.

Rhythmbox has had a music store integrated into it, making it resemble iTunes more. This is quite a controversial decision, not least because one of the Ubuntu philosophies is to provide software ‘free of charge’, and because the store sells media in the MP3 format. Considering that Ubuntu cannot play MP3′s by default, this is a shortfall, although in fairness the people behind the store can hardly be expected to change every single one of their files into the OGG format just for a small minority of their customers. This isn’t an ideal situation, but maybe if enough people request it, they might do it.

The store itself is quite small in comparison to most, although it has a fairly wide selection of music on there, and this situation is bound to improve as time goes on.

An interesting bug was that Rhythmbox was attempting to play files that were certainly not music files, like a few of the files belonging to Eclipse that have strayed into my music folder.

There has been a change of software bundled with Ubuntu as well. GIMP has been banished to the repositories, as have many of the games bundled with Ubuntu, such as Nibbles. Gwibber, a twitter client, has been added, along with PiViTi, a piece of video editing software.

Overall there seems to have been quite a few changes to Ubuntu in this release. However, most of these are cosmetic measures. As well, many of them look like an attempt to boost revenue at Canonical. Over the long term, this may not go down too well with the community. Still, I’ve found this to be an excellent release, far better than the 9.10 which I didn’t give a lot of love.

Fortunately there is a simple way to do it in terminal. In Ubuntu (and distros based upon it) type:

gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

In Debian type:

su
gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
And add the following line to the file:
blacklist pcspkr

Save it and reboot. Now the CPU beep should be disabled!

I found an excellent way of browsing FTP servers as if the folders were on your machine in Nautilus, which is very useful for editing files on a remote server, because you can use your custom IDE rather than being forced having to use several programs. To do this is simple. Start up Nautilus and go to file > Connect to Server. You should get a pop up. On that you need to click on the “Public FTP” drop down list and on that select (FTP with login). Enter all the required values in the fields. (You will be asked for a password later if you need one) Nautilus will now connect to the server and should ask you for a password if you need one. If that all goes well, you should be able to browse the FTP server like it is on your computer!

1. Open the Terminal by Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal. Type in: sudo -s [Enter]

At the prompt give your administrator password. This logs you into terminal as the Administrator, giving you all the permissions you will need.

2. Type: wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/karmic.list –output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list [Enter]

(Replace “karmic” with the code-name of the distribution you are using.) This adds the medibuntu packages to your sources, allowing you to install the packages using apt-get. This technique may work with other Linux Distributions by leaving the Ubuntu code-name in but I have not tested that.

3. Type: apt-get update && apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && apt-get update [Enter]

This file contains the software keys which tell your computer that the medibuntu packages are legitimate.

4. Type: apt-get install libdvdcss-dev non-free-codecs vlc [Enter]

The above code installs the packages above and their dependencies, which include many important files such as libdvdcss2 and w32codecs. It also installs VLC Media Player.

Here is a full list of all the packages that the above command installs:

• libamrnb3
• libamrwb3
• ubuntu-restricted-extras
• w32codecs
• libdvdcss2
• libc6 (>= 2.4)
• libstdc++5 (>= 1:3.3.4-1)
• flashplugin-nonfree
• gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg
• gstreamer0.10-pitfdll [i386]
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly
• gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse
• icedtea6-plugin [amd64]
• libavcodec-unstripped-51
• libdvdread3 libmp3lame0
• msttcorefonts sun-java6-jre [amd64]
• sun-java6-plugin [i386]
• unrar

After this, your Encrypted DVDs should play faultlessly on VLC Media Player.

Common Problems

Enabling Direct Memory Access (DMA)

Jerky, jumpy or halted playback can occur. There is a bug in Totem Movie Player. Before trying anything else, switch to VLC Media Player and see if this solves the DVD playback.

If jerky video persits, it may be because DMA is not enabled for your DVD drive. DMA is enabled by default in most cases. The instructions below show how to check and, if necessary enable DMA.

Open Terminal by Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal.

Type in: sudo -s [Enter] followed by your Administrator password.

Next put a DVD in the drive and type in

: mount | egrep ‘udf|iso9660′ [Enter]

You should see a line like: /dev/scd0 on /media/cdrom0 type udf (ro,nosuid,nodev,utf8,user=you)

The important part of this is the first bit: /dev/scd0. This tells you the mount point (the label) your computer gives to your DVD drive. scd or sda indicates that your DVD drive is treated as a SCSI drive. Something like hda indicates your drive is IDE.

First check the speed of your drive by typing:

sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda [Enter] (Change sda to your drive location as determined in the previous step.)

Speeds of more than 3MB/s for the buffered disk indicate that DMA is not the problem. Any lower and you should try to enable DMA. For IDE Drives, follow the instructions for using hdparm to enable DMA.

For SCSI Drives skip to the section for enabling DMA with a SCSI Drive Enabling DMA with `hdparm` for IDE Drives To enable DMA, you need to use the hdparm command and the configuration file hdparm.conf. These instructions assume that your DVD drive is hdc.

1. See the what the settings are on /dev/hdc sudo hdparm /dev/hdc

2. If you get a line like using_dma = 1 (on), DMA is already enabled. Skip to step 4 to see if it has been enabled at boot time.

3. Enable DMA on /dev/hdc sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hdc

4. You have now enabled DMA for the drive. However, in order for the settings to be automatically applied at boot there you need to edit the /etc/hdparm.conf script. To do this use this command:

gksudo gedit /etc/hdparm.conf

Add the following three lines to the end of your hdparm.conf

/dev/hdc {

dma = on

}

(Another way of avoiding editing of the hdparm.conf file is to simply run sudo hdparm -d1 -k1 /dev/hdc to keep the DMA flag.)

A common problem when you try to enable DMA is getting an error like

HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

HDIO_GET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

This is a known bug in hdparm to which there is no solution or workaround. You will not be able to control DMA and if your drive is too slow (very unlikely with modern drives) you may need to replace your drive.

Enabling DMA with SCSI DVD drives

DMA is generally turned on by default, but sometimes the generic ATA module doesn’t work. Find out if this is the case by typing:

dmesg | grep ata [Enter]

A line like this below would show DMA disabled.

ata2.00: simplex DMA is claimed by other device, disabling DMA

If this is the case type the following:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/aliases [Enter]

And add the following three lines to the bottom of the file:

## Turn on DMA for DVD ############################
alias ata_generic off
alias pata_atiixp on

Reboot and DMA should work. You can verify this by typing:

dmesg | grep ata [Enter]

Two of the lines will resemble this:

[ 23.937141] ata2.00: ATAPI: MATSHITAUJ-845D, D100, max UDMA/33
[ 24.108846] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/33

If your drives are configured in [Cable Select] mode and while running hdparm commands you receive errors related to timeouts or drive not ready, try changing the drive to be a master or slave device depending on your system configuration. This does require opening the case and as far as I know most drives are set to Cable Select from the manufacturer.

Sometimes step 3 above can fail with an “Operation Not Permitted” message. You can fix this by editing the file /etc/modules.

In Terminal, type:

sudo gedit /etc/modules

For an Intel CPU put the two lines

piix
ide-core

above the line ide-cd

For an AMD CPU put the line amd74xx above ide-cd

For a VIA Chipset put via82cxxx above ide-cd

Then reboot and try steps 3-4 again….

If the problem still persists, and you’re using a SATA hard drive, then the SATA module has to be loaded first before the ide-cd. Add sata_sil to the beginning of your /etc/modules file then reboot.

DMA should now work on your drive and playback should be less jerky.