Some time ago, 59 days to be more specific, Fedora reached the impressive number of one million unique installs, after 74 days from the release of ZOD (FC6). Today, after 133 days from the release of Fedora Core 6, they've reached the amazing two million Fedora unique users number: "Somewhere in the last hour or two, we hit the 2 million mark on Fedora Core 6 installations. Congrats to the whole Fedora community. We have a statistics page on the Fedora wiki that tracks these metrics, and also talks about what the numbers mean, and where they come from." -says Max Spevack, the Fedora Project Leader.

Another interesting thing is the architecture statistics, now that their sample size is very large:

Fedora Core 6 x86 -- 87.94%
Fedora Core 6 x86_64 -- 11.72%
Fedora Core 6 ppc -- 0.35%

In order to get the Fedora Core 6 download statistics, the team uses Cacti (an open source data-collection and graphing software) to track the unique IP addresses that connected with yum to receive updates. "This metric is much more useful than tracking downloads, because it demonstrates actual 'installed instances' of FC6 that are making a connection back to our servers in search of updated software." - says Max Spevack, the Fedora Project leader.

Max Spevack is thrilled about these good metrics of Fedora Core 6 (Zod), especially because they were missing in previous releases of Fedora Linux distribution. Released in June 2005, Fedora Core 4 has no statistical data, as for the Fedora Core 5 release, the only statistics were about the BitTorrent downloads. Zod has achieved in no more than 133 days about 88% of the total BitTorrent activity that Bordeaux has seen since its release on 20 March 2006.

Fedora 7, which is currently in development, will be profiled with a new tool called Smolt. Smolt is a basic hardware profiler, it's intended to be a profiler to get automated information from users and this should make it easier for Fedora developers to do what they need to do. You can look at the Smalt statistics for Fedora, here.

You can download Fedora Core 6 now from Softpedia.