Smolt

Smolt is a computer software that gathers hardware information from computers running Linux, and submits them to a central server for statistical purposes, quality assurance and support. It was initiated by Fedora, with the release of Fedora 7 and is now a combined effort of various Linux projects. Information collection is voluntary (opt-in) and anonymous. Smolt does not run automatically. It requests permission before uploading new data to the Smolt server.

General
Before Smolt there was no widely-accepted system for assembling Linux statistics in one place. Smolt is not the first nor the only attempt, but it is the first accepted by major Linux distributions.

Collecting this kind of data across distributions can:
 * aid developers in detecting hardware that is poorly supported
 * focus efforts on popular hardware
 * provide workaround and fix tips
 * help users to choose the best distribution for their hardware
 * convince hardware vendors to support Linux

Getting Smolt
Currently you can use Smolt on:
 * Fedora, officially included
 * openSUSE, officially included since openSUSE 11.1 for older versions see openSUSE Software search
 * RHEL and CentOS see http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/
 * Gentoo Linux see http://packages.gentoo.org/package/app-admin/smolt

Smolt server
The smolt server, at smolts.org, stores all collected data.