I don’t know who of you have read about the news from facebook going to give access to addresses and phone numbers…
In fact, we’re telling our users the same: Share your hardware information with us (no personal data but not fully different).
We’ve launched fireinfo for collecting data which has a bad reputation these days because of abuse from others. The new thing is, that the information is not hidden and statistics about that are viewable by everybody.
After a short look on that charts, we were surprised by them (my favorite is this one) and the first conclusion we made out of fireinfo was, that we do not need to provide a version of IPFire that is compiled in a 64-bit architecture. Developers were wondering about this a long time and as there are only about 25% of all systems that are able to run such a version, there is currently no need to.
As a compromise, there is a new PAE-enabled kernel available in IPFire 2.9 which supports more than 4GB of memory in a 32-bit system. This is working for 75% of all users. (See http://fireinfo.ipfire.org/stats/cpuflags).
Thanks for your trust that you all brought to fireinfo and that we will find out more interesting hardware-related stuff.