Getting Fedora Survey Result Discussion

Hey, so I’ve been pondering the results of the ‘getting Fedora’ survey that I compiled last night. Here’s what I’ve been thinking about and some of my ideas. Please share your own and let me know if I’m off-base with any of my ideas

• The vast majority of survey respondents came from planet.fpo and planet.GNOME, so we can assume that this survey represents responses from users who are experienced with open source & Linux and are likely quite techincal.
• The number one trigger by far (a trigger for 92% of respondents) for downloading a Fedora release is when we have a new release. This means a few things – download volume and the visibility of our download pages will be highest around a release. If we want to make a high-visibility change, have the greatest impact, and get the highest volume of feedback on changes, making the changes around a release is ideal. If we want to make a more experimental change and don’t want to affect a lot of people right away and go about things a bit more quietly, inbetween releases is best.
• New hardware, friends, and hardware failure are are the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th reasons respectively that people download Fedora. These were almost always listed as a secondary reason to download Fedora. Fewer respondents indicated downloading Fedora in order to upgrade a system whose Fedora version was no longer supported. I think this probably indicates a lot of the respondents like downloading and installing the latest rather than hanging back on older releases in order to maintain stability.
• Just an idea: we don’t advertise Fedora as a solution to help diagnose/fix problems with other OSes or HW issues, yet they do seem a common trigger for downloading Fedora. To reach out to these users with some documentation might be an interesting avenue to recruit users from other OSes.
• 46% – less than half – of respondents visit www.fedoraproject.org to obtain a copy of Fedora. This is actually a lot less than I was expecting. The 2nd, 3rd, and 4th reasons, which are all used by about the same percentage of participants (15-19%) are going directly to torrent.fpo, preupgrade, and going directly to get.fpo. We have a LOT of different methods for getting Fedora… and besides www.fpo their usage seems scattered. I think there are many users who know what they want (torrent vs mirror vs spins vs etc etc etc) so it’s important that we maintain and socialize a consistent and easy naming scheme for these various download portals so folks who know what they’re doing have an easy URL to remember and punch in. Many of the portals (mirrors.fpo is an example) aren’t really branded with what they are, so branding these sites with clear names and pushing their URLs maybe even within the body of the page might be an effective way to make them easier for these users to remember.
• Spins.fpo is not currently widely used, with only 6% of the 78 respondents reporting having using it. For us to rely on it more in the future means we definitely need to plan on socializing it and marketing it widely.
• Experienced users have a lot of different ways they download Fedora, and many do not involve the website – local mirrors, PXE, FWN/Announcement links, even their own mirrors and surprisingly using yum to upgrade. If we target experienced users for downloads on www.fpo, more than half of them aren’t even going to bother to look.
• Users from other distros do download Fedora to take a look but not necessarily to migrate. A few mentioned trying it out on virtual machines. The release notes are probably important to these folks so they can see if there’s anything new that they want to check out.
• By far the two most popular downloads of Fedora are the DVD (63% of respondents)and Live Media (49% of respondents.) To me this indicates that the DVD shuld probably be the heaviest-weighted option on the screen(s) we put together for more advanced users.
• There are respondents who indicated wanting a copy each of GNOME and KDE live media, so on the spins page these should be labeled as such (e.g., the Desktop spin should have some indication that it is GNOME-based.)
• Boot-image/netinstall/etc and preupgrade were Fedoras respondents ‘got’ and had respectable numbers – 22% and 21% respectively. Preupgrade is getting a lot of usage despite not being advertised on the current download pages.
• Several respondents pointed out they prefer to download the minimum (boot image / initrd / etc) and download only what they need on demand so as to not waste space on things they never use. It would be interesting to dig a little bit more into this case and consider tailoring to these folks on the advanced page as well, as it seems 1 out of 5 respondents use this minimal install method.
• Not many respondents indicated relying on purchasing physical media or the Free Media program, which makes sense since if they have low-no internet connectivity, they couldn’t have answered the survey.
• Many respondents indicated they use the LiveMedia either strictly or primarily as a ’showcase,’ so it may be worth considering posing it as such.
• Several folks indicated that they install from Beta or Prerelease media and track upgrade from there. This is an option not detailed or outlined anywhere. One respondent actually stated they wanted to help out by testing things and such by using rawhide and didn’t know how to do this. This may indicate a need for better documentation on what ‘Rawhide’ is, why you would use it, and how to get it and use it.

Getting Fedora Survey Results

Some caveats:

• Many respondents gave multiple answers to questions. I counted every answer – I did not limit each respondent to one answer. Maybe this means using pie charts is bogus (I’m open for other recommendations!) But consider that the percentages are percentages of the total responses, which is greater than the number of total respondents (78) so when you’re reading it, don’t think “5% of respondents only do this” think “5% of respondents do this, and they might do other things as well.”
• I tallied everything manually, copying from the blog post comments to an OO.o spreadsheet. I’m sure there’s manual errors. With 78 respondents though hopefully it all rounds out.

Okay, with those out of the way… here’s what I’ve got from my earlier survey on how folks get Fedora:

There’s a lot of interesting points brought up in the comments, you can read them for yourself but here are some that caught my attention:

• Two respondents pointed out they download during beta or pre-release and track rawhide following that rather than waiting for final.
• The most frequent standard response that I saw to A B C was 1 5 1.
• Many people noted once they download, they keep that copy around for later use.
• Some folks mentioned downloading live media specifically for USB keys only (cheaper overall than blank DVD media)
• A few respondents mentioned they are primarily Ubuntu or other distro users but download Fedora during a new release to see the new technology.
• Several people noted they like to download the bare minimum, the initrd and boot image or whatnot, because they’d rather install things they need on demand than have them waste HDD space and potentially never get used.
• A few respondents mentioned they get the LiveMedia strictly for showing off / demoing.
• One respondent pointed out he gets one each of GNOME and KDE Live Media.
• A couple people mentioned braveness being involved in preupgrading. Also some mentioned they’d like to use preupgrade but for various reasons couldn’t.
• A lot more people upgrade via yum than I thought would.
• One person pointed out they go to get.fpo specifically because they know a KDE link isn’t elsewhere.

Here’s my work produced during this:

• The ODF spreadsheet used to tally the results and generate the graphs. (244K OpenOffice.org Calc ODS file)
• Inkscape SVG Source for the prettifying I did of the graphs.

(174K Inkscape SVG file)

It’s late here so I’ve not quite processed all of this, but I already have some ideas on how to interpret all this so hopefully I’ll follow up with a later post.

Open Source, Portable Usability Testing Lab: Part 1

Note: The pipeline in this post is horribly inefficient and lacks audio. Please see Ray Strode’s blogpost on usability video pipelines to obtain a much improved version of the pipeline in this blog post.

Thanks to all the folks who responded so quickly to help out on my last blog post! Because of your help, a bug got filed and fixed upstream in gstreamer, and a new build of gstreamer containing the fix for Fedora is on the way.

So I bet you were wondering why I was so interested in getting AVF videos into gstreamer, right? Well, I’m going to tell you anyway.

I’m in the process of putting together a portable usability testing lab. The key component to this usability testing lab is a quad-video-input video mixer / DVR unit. It can be hooked up to 3 cameras and one scan converter so you can have 3 panels of the user / testing environment and one panel showing the screen of the system they’re using. The particular unit I decided to get is the AVer Media AVerDiGi EB1304NET SATA+.

Now, there are a couple quirks to the EB1304. The first I noticed was that its audio input/output jacks are, well, a little unique:

Yes. It takes bare wires with little metal clips. I haven’t tested it yet, but the fine technical support folks at CCTV Wholesalers (who, by the way, I highly recommend for price, shipping speed, and speedy & helpful support) assure me it’ll work, so that’s something I’ll be testing out soon.

The second quirk, of course, is more crucial to the usefulness of the unit – the video files it outputs. While this little unit is an embedded Linux product (woo!), the file formats it produces unfortunately are not so open & standard. As I mentioned in my previous blog post about AVF files, it provides you with both an AVF (which is really just an AVI file with a slightly tainted header) and a TBL file for each of the four input videos. Now, these play fine in mplayer, vlc, and very soon gstreamer-backed players, but, one of the reasons I want to capture four videos at once is to produce usability testing videos that show both what the user is working on and their reaction, ideally a single video with all four inputs in a quad-split screen. AVer Media provides a CD-ROM with a bunch of Windows-only programs to do this in software – and they don’t even run in Wine. So, I wanted to try to get the AVFs working in gstreamer so that I could use gstreamer pipelines to achieve this quad-split video.

Well, since the updated gstreamer for Fedora wasn’t yet available this morning, I took Nicu’s advice and used mencoder to convert the AVF files to AVI:


mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o ch1.avi 2009_08_25_21_07_59_ch1.avf


Next, the ever-amazing Ray Strode hacked on putting together the gstreamer pipeline necessary to stitch them together into one video:


gst-launch -v filesrc location=ch2.avi ! decodebin ! videoscale ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=720,height=480 ! videobox left=-720 top=-480 border-alpha=0 ! videomixer name=right ! videomixer name=three ! videomixer name=all ! alpha ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=all.ogv filesrc location=ch1.avi ! decodebin ! videoscale ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=720,height=480 ! videobox border-alpha=0.0 left=-720 ! alpha ! ffmpegcolorspace ! all. filesrc location=ch4.avi ! decodebin ! videoscale ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=720,height=480 ! videobox border-alpha=0.0 top=-480 ! alpha ! ffmpegcolorspace ! three. filesrc location=ch3.avi ! decodebin ! videoscale ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=720,height=480 ! alpha ! ffmpegcolorspace ! right.


AWESOME, right? Here’s the result, although I took the video of me out and replaced it with another copy of the screen video because I’m shy :

Download in OGV format

As we go through this process, I’m making sure to document everything so anybody else who wanted to put together a similar kit without having to run proprietary software to do so can learn from this experience. One of my next blog posts is going to be a rundown of all of the equipment I ordered for our kit with photos and writeups of how to use it all so if you are interested in this, you can look forward to that.

Next up is figuring out that little beastie of an audio input and then updating the pipeline to handle the audio. Wish me luck!

AVF files… sigh

So I got this video here:

http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/temp/vidvid/2009_08_25_21_07_59_ch3.avf

It has a friend:

http://duffy.fedorapeople.org/temp/vidvid/2009_08_25_21_07_59_ch3.tbl

I installed the whole triumvirate of codecs including the naughties – gstreamer-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-ugly. I also installed mplayer and vlc. Mplayer and VLC can play it. Gstreamer can’t. It says it’s DIVX. :-/ any ideas?

How Do You Get Fedora?

This is an informal survey, depending on the results I may or may not set up a more formal survey.

Question A: Why and when do you download Fedora?

First off, why and when do you download Fedora? Some suggestions:

1. A new Fedora release comes out and you want a copy (release trigger.)
2. You’ve obtained a new piece of hardware and want to put Fedora on it (hardware trigger.)
3. You’re at a friend’s house and you’re helping them install Fedora (spread Fedora trigger.)
4. You’re grabbing a copy of Fedora to burn onto several disks to bring to your LUG meeting (f2f event trigger.)
5. You or someone you know has massive HW failure and you want to make a LiveMedia disc or USB key so they can still use their computer while waiting on parts (solution trigger.)
6. Another reason?

Why and when else do you download Fedora?

Question B: How do you get Fedora?

So you need to get a copy of Fedora and install it. How do you do this? Some suggestions:

1. Pick up a hard copy of a disc (live media or DVD?) at an event.
2. Click a link in the release announcement or in FWN
3. Don’t download, use PXE boot.
4. Kickstart using some other management service other than PXE boot.
5. Go to www.fedoraproject.org, and click on download
6. Go straight to get.fedoraproject.org
7. Go straight to mirrors.fedoraproject.org
8. Go straight to torrent.fedoraproject.org
9. Go straight to spins.fedoraproject.org
10. Through the Fedora Unity project
11. Look up Fedora on a bittorrent tracker that is NOT torrent.fedoraproject.org
12. Don’t download, preupgrade.
13. Get a copy / usb key from a friend
14. Download or obtain copy from local source (e.g., university student gets a copy from university help desk, employee at a company gets it from internal mirror)
15. Purchase physical media from an online store
16. Free Media Program
17. Some other method?

Question C: What Fedora do you get?

When you ‘download Fedora’, what is it you’re actually downloading?

1. The Fedora DVD iso
2. A LiveMedia spin iso (any spin)
3. boot image to do a net install
4. Nothing, I use preupgrade.
5. Some other type of Fedora?

Thanks in advance for your help! If you want to keep your answer short & sweet, that’s cool, you can use a format like this:

A: 3
B: 2
C: 5 – I download blah blah

Please note, I’m interested in how YOU personally would answer them, only; your thoughts on how other people would answer will not help.

Anaconda & Advanced Storage Devices

At FUDcon Berlin I started working on mockups to improve Anaconda’s UI with respect to advanced storage devices. E.g., fibre channel, iSCSI, multipath storage devices, etc. etc. etc. – storage devices beyond simple hard drives in your laptop or in your desktop system case. Right now there are a few concerns for working with these devices in Anaconda:

• It can be a little difficult to identify these devices. Depending on the interconnect and depending on what information the administrators of the storage devices provide you with, different types of information are useful and some are not. For example, the vendor’s name of a RAID BIOS array may not be all that useful since multiple types of hard drives may be part of the array, but whether or not a SAN is EMC or QLogic may actually be a useful distinguishing characteristic.
• These types of devices, if there are enough of them on the network, can take too long to load into the UI.
• It can be a little bit scary to be certain of which drives are merely being mounted post-install and which are getting formatted as part of the install.

The Anaconda UI redesign mockup work is still in progress, but I’ve got a pretty good set of mockups for the first half of installation. If there are any multipath / other advanced storage device users out there, I would *love* to hear your feedback on these. Here’s a sampling to entice you to visit the full set of mockups:

Fedora Spins Site Idea

Just an idea for a front page of a spins site. Still a work in progress, I have to work on a few things like:

• nicer ‘did you really mean to download the main Fedora download?’ notice in the upper right
• download buttons are still buggin’ me, and most of these are going to be bittorrent downloads so maybe download button is a bad idea or maybe there should be some kind of ‘how to use bittorrent’ thinger
• weekly top spins list – point behind this is to give some guidance to users overwhelmed by the choices and not sure what to pick. any ideas on other ways to do this would be appreciated
• weekly top spins list – since some downloads are torrent and some are not these stats could be hard to get
• make this more community-oriented / alive… i added the interview splash with Chitlesh on FEL at the bottom, trying to come up with more ideas to make it feel alive – would general Federal event and news listings make sense here or would they be confusing cuz they’re not spin-related?
• still need to mockup the ‘about spins’ page..

Let me know what you think.

Fedora Website Design Ideas

While stickster was in the Boston area this week, we collaborated on some new design ideas for www.fedoraproject.org and for get.fedoraproject.org.

What do you think? I’ll give you a run-down of the front page design:

Tour Widget

This is a very simplistic design but the basic idea is you have a scrollbox of screenshots you can click through and get descriptions of.

Fedora fits in your life

The idea behind this is to be a rotating widget that shows how Fedora fits into your life. Some ideas on how to do this include talking about music, photos, chat, email, browsing, etc. and mention the tools used in each, linking out to a page of more details on each topic. This particular mocked up one focuses on listening to music.

What makes Fedora different?

This widget is meant to operate similarly to the previous one – there’s a set of different static content that gets loaded into it on a rotating basis. The content here focuses on what makes Fedora different than other operating systems.

You can do this in Fedora!

This widget, again, meant to be rotating content, focusing on the little cool things you can do if you use Fedora. Some ideas we came up with for projects include making funny portraits in Cheese and creating Andy-Warholesque bitmap traced artwork in Inkscape. The main goal of this widget is to entice downloads.

Who uses Fedora?

Another rotating set of content to show real-life Fedora users and talk about how they use it.

The full set of mockups are here:

• Front Page
• Get Fedora (please excuse the stick figure art )
• Install Splash – similar to how getfirefox.com gives you a splash screen when you go to download

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P.S. – As Craig and Bob reminded me to point out, we’re not going to actually use stock photo imagery in the real site. That’s why we need YOUR photos to make this redesign a success. Drop me a comment here if you’d be willing to help us fill the site with photos of actual Fedora users, even better, if you’d be willing to be interviewed for one of the user profiles or have an idea for a project!

Help us Brainstorm to make Fedora Community better!

UPDATED: Thanks to everybody who attended the brainstorm; we got a lot of great ideas! Check out the IRC log and our notes from the meeting.

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We’re going to have an open brainstorming session on where Fedora Community could go in the future. If you’ve got cool ideas you’d like to suggest or if you’d just like to join in the fun, the session is starting in less than an hour – 11 AM eastern US time (15:00 UTC).

We’ll have a Gobby session, a Fedora talk session, and IRC available for the brainstorm. Here’s the details from Spot’s announcement of this session:

• Gobby joining instructions – the document we’ll be working on is “Fedora Community Brainstorm”
• IRC: #moksha on irc.freenode.net (we’ll be watching and taking
  questions from the channel)
• Telephone: This is where we’ll be doing the talking:
  • US Toll-Free: 800-451-8679
  • Conference Code: 22717 79826

  (If you need an international dial-in number, let us know in IRC and we may be able to provide it.)
  Please be kind and mute your line if you’re not asking a question. If
  the noise on the call becomes unbearable, I will mute everyone.

Hope to see you there!