Linux Counter Frequently Asked Questions
OK, not everything about the counter is intuitive. Here are some
answers to questions we've had (or wanted to ask ourselves).
Common questions
- Why is the Linux Counter so ugly?
- How do I get the nifty certificate to put on my home page?
- Why is the United Kingdom named GB and not UK?
- Why is Hongkong city within China and not a country?
- Why are there so many small islands in the country list?
- Are the raw numbers used to generate smallplot.png available?
- My browser complains about not being able to validate the Linux Counter site certificate. What about it?
- What is the purpose of the Linux Counter?
- The Counter does not accept mail I sent to it
- Why is this FAQ so short?
Person registration
- My registration number is 250.000; the counter has 100.000 people. Why?
- I registered my personal information more than once. What should I do?
- How do I change my personal information?
- Why should I login once a year?
- I was too late using the renewal link in the mail. What should I do?
Machine registration
- How do I change my machine information?
- I want to add XXX machines. Is there a form to handle it?
- The machine-update script uses sendmail. I do not have sendmail installed at the machine
- The report about my registered machines has a line saying "- also reported at -". What does this mean?
Common questions
Why is the Linux Counter so ugly?
Because of 2 things:- We are an HTML purists. We prefer simple HTML that loads fast and displays in most browsers. In particular, We don't like embedded scripting, though we use it to protect email addresses.
- We are not a Web artists, and know we are not. We know good design when we see it, but we don't know how to make it ourselves
How do I get the nifty certificate to put on my home page?
Two methods, one for the point-and-click types, one for the brave.First method, you'll need your user key (something like 1234-5678), and a graphical browser:
- Go to http://counter.li.org/login.php and log in
- Go to your home page
- Press "Edit my person entry"
- Use the right-click on the image in the upper left-hand corner and choose "save image as" (or equivalent)
- Move the image to where you keep your images for use in Web pages
wget -O certificate.png http://counter.li.org/cgi-bin/certificate.cgi/1234
PLEASE don't place an URL pointing to the certificate on your page; that means the counter is hit every time your page gets a hit.....and I'd rather spend the CPU power on making registrations faster.
Suggested HTML to embrace the certificate:
<a href="http://counter.li.org/"> <img src="certificate.png" alt="Linux Counter #1234"> </a>Have fun!
Why is the United Kingdom named GB and not UK?
Oh glorious politics....The official name of the UK is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". When ISO 2-letter country codes were assigned, rumour has it that several members of the ISO comittee rebelled against using the "generic term" "united kingdom" as basis for a country code for an old imperial power, and enforced the code that fit the largest entity within that union.
Of course, IANA, the domain name registration agency, like everyone else at the time, "knew" that the country was called UK, so the toplevel domain for the country was assigned as "UK" - it didn't bother to check the standards, it was so obvious.
Except that it wasn't.
The counter is very strict in trying not to invent new
coding systems where old codes exist; in this particular case, it
strictly follows a rule that says that country codes come from the
Berlin maintenance agency for the ISO 3166 code space. So, until that
agency changes the code for GB, GB it will stay.
Why are there so many small islands in the country list?
From the above question, you will see that the counter has decided to make someone else the authority for what a country is or is not. In this particular case, it uses the ISO 3166 list of country codes as its reference.Making decisions about what is or is not a country is a hard task. And no matter how you do it, some people will be angry at you. So we are happy someone else is solving this nasty point!
Nonetheless, we are not completely unreasonable; if you see some place in the lists that you don't think should be listed as its own country, send a message to and the country managers for the place and the country you want it to be part of, describing:
- What code and place you are talking about
- What country it should be listed under, and why
Are the raw numbers used to generate smallplot.png available?
The raw numbers used to generate smallplot.png, the image on the main Linux Counter page, are avaible for everybody in the file country.story. Just don't use the numbers to do any kind of prediction, as it won't make sense.
My browser complains about not being able to validate the Linux Counter site certificate. What about it?
This site is secured with a certificate from CAcert. The first time when you visit a part of our site that is secured with a certificate from CAcert, you will get a popup from you browser telling you that you do not trust this site. To get rid of that popup in future you can install the certificate from the Linux Counter site.Alas, not many applications have installed by default the CAcert Class 1 and Class 3 root certificates that the Linux Counter certificate is based on. Thus, when installing the Linux Counter certificate your browser will probably complain about the fact that their is not enough information to verify the certificate. This means that your browser is missing the CAcert Class 1 and Class 3 root certificates. You can get these certificates from CAcert. After installing these certificates the validation of the Linux Counter certificate will be correct.
What is the purpose of the Linux Counter?
Dealing with all kinds of statistics on Linux usage. For more information, please have a look at the Project info page via the top menu bar.The Counter does not accept mail I sent to it
The Linux Counter makes available a number of email addresses for certain purposes. To start with you should really think about using the correct email address for the question, remark, information or problem you have. Then, when you sent your mail to the correct email address and find it bounced, rejected or you never hear anything again about the email you sent us, please consider the following points:- Make sure you did not send us a virus. Emails containing virusses will most certainly be dropped silently
- Make sure you did not send us spam. Spam emails mostly will be dropped silently. When your email has the luck we have to deal with it manually, chances are high that we report the spam at SpamCop
- Make sure your email does not contain images. Due to the large number of image spams the Counter receives, we decided to silently ban emails having image attachments
- Only send emails to the Linux Counter that are related to the Linux Counter. The Counter people do not offer support for installing Linux, they are not able to find old friends and relatives for you and do not deal with questions about placing advertisements at the site. Linking to the site is always allowed. You do not have to ask for it. Depending on the number of emails to deal with, emails in this category will either receive an answer or will be silently deleted
- Make sure you correctly spelled the email address
- Finally, give us some time to deal with your email. As the Counter receives huge amounts of email, it sometimes can take a couple of weeks before we are able to deal with your email. This mostly has to do with obligations not related to the Linux Counter.
Why is this FAQ so short?
Because we haven't got all the answers....and of those we know, we haven't gotten around to putting them all here.
If you think something should be here, and you have figured out the
answer (perhaps from a previous email), send us text!
Person registration
My registration number is 250.000; the counter has 100.000 people. Why?
A registration number is given to every email address that registers with the counter, and never reused. Some reasons why there are accounts with numbers, but not counted:- Some people are deleted from the counter, either by themselves, or by me when I recognize they're invalid registrations
- Some people registered only machines, and not themselves (or perhaps their machine from one address, themselves from another)
- The Great Deletion of November 2001 removed 90.000 entries. The routines established then will continue to remove old, stale registrations in the future.
- Some "registrations" are spam
I registered my personal information more than once. What should I do?
When, by accident or when you have forgotten your old registration key, you get registered more than once, you can solve this in 2 ways:- Go to the Login page (Login link in menu bar on top of each page), and login with the key and password of the registration you want to remove. Once logged in, click the "Edit my person entry" link. In the screen which then shows, on the bottom you'll find a button called "Delete person info". After clicking this button your registration is gone.
NOTE: This way of removing your registration has one small side effect: the emaill address used in the registration cannot never be used again in any other registration. - The most preferable way: Send a mail to
asking for a merger of your registrations. This will always merge registrations to the registration with the lowest key. During a merger all email addresses found in the registrations will be connected to the final registration. This way the problem in the note at the end of option one is solved.
Put in the mail as much information as you have about the registrations you want to merge, especially when you don't know all the registrations keys anymore. The more information you can give us, the easier it is for us to find the correct registrations to merge.
How do I change my personal information?
Go to the Login page (Login link in menu bar on top of each page), and login with your key and password. Once logged in, click the "Edit my person entry" link. On the new page change whatever information you need to change and click the button called "Enter data!" on the bottom of that page to effectuate the changes.Why should I login once a year?
First of all: the project is not trying to get more hits on the website. We don't care about the number of hits much.The Linux Counter is doing statistics on the registrations entered. In statistics it is common to verify the data set used, as one wants ito have as good results of the statistics as possible.
As people move around the world, often change their email addresses and even stop using Linux (Why should they :-), registrations can become partly or completely invalid over time, thus messing up the counter's statistics.
To have an as clean data set as possible, the Linux Counter project has decided to send an email to everybody once a year, asking to login and verify the registration information. Rules have been defined what should be done with registrations which have not been verified for a certain amount of time.
I was too late using the renewal link in the mail. What should I do?
When a registrations becomes frozen, a email messages is sent to the person asking him to verify the registration. The mail presents two ways to actually go to your registration.The first way is to use the link in the mail which automatically log you in and pops up your registration page. This link is only valid for week. Using it after that week will bring up an error page. Due to hollidays and other reasons chance is that you are too late to use this link. Although you cannot use the link anymore, this does not mean your registration is gone completely and you have to register again. You still can log in to your registration using the old (and second) way to enter the registration: Go to counter site, find the "Login" option in the top menu bar and manually log in using the key and password sent to you in the email. The same registration page as above will pop up.
So, although the link is there as a convenient and fast way to enter your registration page, it does not mean your registration is gone when the link is not working anymore. You just need to log in manually.
Machine registration
How do I change my machine information?
Go to the Login page (Login link in menu bar on top of each page), and login with your key and password. Once logged in, on the bottom of your home page you find a table called "My machines". Click on the name link of the machine which information you want to change. On the new page make your changes and click the button called "Update record" on the bottom of that page to effectuate the changes.I want to add XXX machines. Is there a form to handle it?
Alas, at the moment, when you want to add a lot of machines to the counter, you have to enter them one by one using the machine form. Although it doesn't help you much now, it is on our todo list to create a multiple machine entry form. As there are some other projects to handle too, and this one isn't as easy as just creating the web form, this one has to fight for its priority with the other projects. So for now, the only promise we will make is that such a form will be there in future .....The machine-update script uses sendmail. I do not have sendmail installed at the machine
Indeed the machine-update script tries to use sendmail to get out the machine updates. That is a known restriction to the script we hope to solve in near future.The report about my registered machines has a line saying "- also reported at -". What does this mean?
When you run the machine-update script for the first time, it creates a directory called .linuxcounter. In that directory it creates a file with the hostname or domainname of the machine the script runs at. The file created has an entry called "uniqueid" with a number next to it. This number is generated randomly and identifies your machine at the Counter, together with the hostname or the domainname of the machine.Whenever that file gets lost (you deleted it or reinstalled the machine), the machine-update script will create a new one and randomly assigns a new uniqueid to the machine. When the machine still has the same hostname or domainname, it now is reported twice (or more) at Counter. In the machine registration table this will be mentioned as "- also reported at -". You will notice however that only one "last auto-update" entry actually shows the correct last update.
In near future we will probably add a delete button you can use to remove the old entry.