Re: Top Ten Tasks For www.fedoraproject.org

[Nicu Buculei <nicu_fedora nicubunu ro>]

Michael Beckwith wrote:
> One thought that I had with regards to #1 was how some websites have 
> automatic detection of components of your computer and offer the right 
> download. For instance, I go to getfirefox.com and it offers me a linux 
> based download, instead of an .exe file. Would it be possible to use 
> some technology like that on the page to help get people the distro faster?

That is trivial, by parsing the User Agent String sent by the browser, 
for example mine is:

"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008043010 
Fedora/3.0-0.60.beta5.fc9 Firefox/3.0b5"

Which tells that I am already using Linux on an x86 *or* X86-64 machine 
(it can't tell if my CPU is 64 or 32 bit, only what I have installed 
currently). So the detection can say which kind of CPU I have: x86 or PPC.

But we already know from smolt [1] that ppc users are less than 1%, i686 
are about 78.7% and x86_64 about 20.2%, so it make sense to promote the 
i686 build.
Of course, if the user is on x86_64, we can assume he want also x86_64 
and direct to that, but this is all.

And no matter which OS the visitor use (Linux, Windows, OS x), we direct 
them to an .iso file. Which one? This is where we should make a 
conscious decision (and I expect the decision to be "Desktop Live CD").

[1] - http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/static/stats/stats.html

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