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Progeny Releases Linux Platform Manager 87

Posted by Hemos from the building-the-interest dept.
IanMurdock writes "Given your previous interest in Progeny, I thought you would be interested in our new Platform Services product direction and the release or our Linux Platform Manager tool. Briefly, Platform Services provides componentized versions of Red Hat and Debian, and Linux Platform Manager allows people to easily assemble these components into custom distributions. You can read more at http://www.progeny.com. More information on our new direction can be found in the Platform Services whitepaper."
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Progeny Releases Linux Platform Manager More

Progeny Releases Linux Platform Manager

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  • Pick A Product (Score:5, Interesting)

    by technomancerX ( 86975 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:38PM (#5632326) Homepage
    Ok, could Progeny maybe pick a product, finish it, release it, and market and support it?

    What is this, version 3 or 4 of 'This is what Progeny does'?

  • SlashAds (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dr. Mojura ( 584120 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:39PM (#5632331)
    Is this important news to all of us, or just a way for Progeny to get some free advertising PR?
    It's hard to keep the bias to a minimum when the story is submitted by the company.

    • Re:SlashAds (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Randolpho ( 628485 )
      Why is it a problem when new technologies or versions of products are listed on Slasdot? It's news, regardless of who submits the article, and what's more, it benefits all. It gives Slashdot content (which it *technically* needs, dispite having content coming out the ears ;)), it gives us, the readers, info on a new product/technology, and it gives the owner of the technology some product awareness ("free advertising").

      When you read, say, Computer Shopper, do you complain when they run an article about the

      • Re:SlashAds (Score:3, Interesting)

        by chrisseaton ( 573490 )
        But Slashdot thinks it's better than that - so it should at least try to live up to the standards it sets for the rest of the world.

        A little disclaimer, "submitted by Ian Whatshisface, founder of Progeny", wouldn't have hurt either.
        • I'm sorry, did you just claim that Slashdot tries to stay neutral? Slashdot, with the Borg-Gates and Broken-Windows idcons?

          heh. Yeah, Slashdot is neutral all right. :)
          • "I'm sorry, did you just claim that Slashdot tries to stay neutral?"

            A quick look at my comment would suggest "no". But it does complain like an old lady when anyone else is not up to the required standard (of which Slashdot itself does not meet)

  • Shameless Plug (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:41PM (#5632335) Homepage Journal
    Slashdot needs a "Shameless Plug" tag to put on articles like this. Look at the submitters address. Slashdot is for news, not PR (unless they are getting paid for this story, in which case, I hope slashdot subscribers don't even get this story displayed to them).

    BTW - What's up with all the Error 500's? Can't the Slashcode guys test the code before pushing it to the 'production' server (btw - these ARE the guys that complain about crashes in windows, then produce slashcode)?

    • Re:Shameless Plug (Score:2, Insightful)

      by jptechnical ( 644454 )
      I think the point was to build awareness

      from the building-the-interest dept.

      and aid in making linux distributions more commonplace and easy to configure. I have installed and configured just about all every distro out there and still find something lacking. If I can get it modularized or configged as the post describes it may put me over the hurdles I have been facing. And as new features and ease of setup issues are resolved the platform becomes more powerful and usable by all. Isn't this the point of Op

      • Re:Shameless Plug (Score:3, Insightful)

        by RevAaron ( 125240 )
        I agree- I think this product has a good potential to provide some thing fairly important than Linux has been missing.

        At first, I thought that perhaps it shouldn't have been posted to Slashdot, at least not until the product is ready to ship/buy/download/use. But then again, Slashdot posts stories about interesting OSS/FS projects when they're in a larval stage, provided they're interesting. I see this as about the same thing, except it looks like this LPM software already exists to an extent- you just c
    • Well, it isn't like they tried to hide it. The wording of the blurb makes that pretty clear.

      Slashdot is more like 2nd hand news (and sometimes 3rd and 4th depending on how many dupes)

      • Well, it isn't like they tried to hide it.

        I think sometimes they do.

        The wording of the blurb makes that pretty clear.

        But more often than not, it doesn't.

    • Deb-Ian (Score:5, Informative)

      by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @03:10PM (#5632456) Homepage
      Let's cut Ian some slack, after all he is the Ian in Debian
      • Not only should we listen to what he has to say because of who Ian is, people should take a look at the article and these threads should be spending more time discussing the content of what Progeny is proposing.

        If you go through and take a look at what it offers, Progeny's platform management not only makes life much easier for development houses (hopefully attracting more apps), but it also makes Linux (using their componentizatio) a much more bullet-proof solution.

        If this catches on, it could become a

    • Re:Shameless Plug (Score:4, Informative)

      by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @03:13PM (#5632465) Homepage Journal
      Slashdot needs a "Shameless Plug" tag to put on articles like this. Look at the submitters address.

      Hey, the submitter is not claiming to be a third party.

      I thought you would be interested in our new Platform Services product direction (emphasis mine)

      Besides, this is Ian Murdock of Debian. Since he's a big name in the free software community, I have no problem with a shameless plug from him. If I guy who's gained a reputation by doing a lot of work uses his status to get some hits and some revenue, well its a nice way of rewarding him.

    • This is just like my last comment on the media industry. I hate it when subscribers and customers are treated like some resource that companies get to exploit for profit whenever they see fit. It is unethical. Its not fair..

      Oh well... best to just ignore it until it goes away.

  • Security (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Florian Weimer ( 88405 ) <fw@deneb.enyo.de> on Monday March 31, 2003 @02:58PM (#5632399) Homepage
    They claim to use APT. APT (as used in Debian) does not offer any security (neither package signatures are verified, nor can you use HTTPS for download).

    Does anybody know if Progeny has resolved this problem, or just doesn't care?
    • I get the package sigs verification, but do you really need to download your *software packages* from a secure server?

      Are you scared someone is gonna snoop in on you downloading the latest version of KDE or something?
      • I get the package sigs verification, but do you really need to download your *software packages* from a secure server?

        You mean using HTTPS? I see this mainly as a cheap option to get secure access to a central, trusted package repository. It's not as good as a whole package-signing infrastructure, but it's easier to implement.
        • But why do you need it to be HTTPS? That merely means no one can intercept your data between you and the server - hardly an issue when you're downloading freely available, open source code.
    • APT (as used in Debian) does not offer any security (neither package signatures are verified, nor can you use HTTPS for download).

      You are free to write and submit patches for that :)

    • Re:Security (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What are you kidding me??? All debain .debs are signed and checked. As far as going over https what is the point? https is only needed to protect sensitive information going over the wire. Since all debian packages are Open Source and no information about the recipient is given https is not needed. There is no restrictions for a repository not being https, it is just that there is no need for the overhead of SSL so debian repositories don't use it.
      • Downloading the .debs over non-ssl is fine, but the sigs should be downloaded over ssl, not really for the encryption, but so that you know they really did come from debian.

        • Re:Security (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Carewolf ( 581105 )
          ????

          Ehmm... That's what signatures are for. You use a signature to detect whether it really comes from Debian.You dont need to encrypt the signature for this to work, all you need is a public/private key-system.
          • Oops, I meant to say checksums. I was thinking about the md5 sums in rpms, I should have reread that before I posted.

      • Re:Security (Score:3, Informative)

        by Florian Weimer ( 88405 )
        What are you kidding me??? All debain .debs are signed and checked.

        Only the initial upload by the Debian developer is checked. Subsequent downloads from the mirror cascade by the users are not checked, and users have to trust the integrity of the cascade (and DNS, and their network connection, and so on).

    • Re:Security (Score:4, Informative)

      by jdaily ( 35368 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @04:18PM (#5632931) Homepage

      Our (Progeny's) implementation of APT is reasonably secure.

      • We have SSL support, derived from a patch [sourcepole.ch] by Tomas Pospisek.
      • We have added authentication and authorization.
      • Debian's APT currently supports the signing of repositories.

      Regarding package signatures: that's more relevant to the package installation tools than to APT itself, but long ago, Progeny wrote and contributed to Debian debsigs [debian.org], a tool for allowing GPG signatures to be embedded in packages.

    • They claim to use APT. APT (as used in Debian) does not offer any security (neither package signatures are verified, nor can you use HTTPS for download).

      Checking the integrity of the distribution by using the signatures on the Release file is being taken care of(from IRC):


      (walters) azeem: my friend and I are almost done with our apt patch. it works now, we just have to clean it up.


      (walters) azeem: individual package signatures is another thing though.

      • Checking the integrity of the distribution by using the signatures on the Release file is being taken care of(from IRC):

        Great news. This solves the "have to trust IP/DNS/mirror cascade" problem. Thanks.

        (Meaningful package signatures are a tough problem because of autobuilders.)

        • Meaningful package signatures are a tough problem because of autobuilders.

          Not too tough, I don't think. You do have to trust the autobuilder boxes, but as long as you can allow that, it's no trouble. The autobuilder should check the signature on the source package (from the maintainer) and then sign the binary package itself, including the signature from the source package.

          The users' installation software, of course, just ends up checking the autobuilder's signature, but trusting a small set of build

  • I realize that there are some press releases that qualify as news, but this one doesn't. Progeny isn't advertising anything that is innovative, cutting edge, free or otherwise newsworthy. All they are announcing is a new way to separate you from your money.

    Please, Slashdot, apply some form of editorial standard to this type of tripe.
    • As to whether or not this qualifies as news, our "downs" in late 2001 qualified as news, so I think it's only fair to qualify the "ups" as news too, don't you? The fact of the matter is that we have quietly done quite well for ourselves over the past year and a half. Given all that's gone on around us, I'm rather proud of what we've accomplished, and I'm ready to let the world in on it.

      As to whether or not what we're doing is innovative or cutting edge: Have you looked at what we are doing? What we are doi
      • heh, no one ever expects Ian Murdock to be reading their posts :) Personally, it sounded like news to me.

        oh and uh thanks for Debian. :)

      • As to whether or not what we're doing is innovative or cutting edge: Have you looked at what we are doing? What we are doing is nothing short of offering a fundamentally different way of looking at "Linux distributions": as platforms for building precisely tuned solutions as opposed to the one-size-fits-all products that traditional distributions give us. Sounds pretty innovative to me, but I will admit a bit of bias. :-)

        So, basically, you're changing the Linux paradigm by leveraging your knowledge of bla

      • Ian,

        Granted, I've just given it a cursory glance at your site, and the answer may be there, but how fine grained is it?

        For example, right now I'm needing ACL support for some Samba servers. I can either use MDK and get support out of the box, use SGI's RedHat installer or roll my own. Since I have to maintain several of these boxes I don't want to have to roll my own, and Mandrake is still just a little iffy for me. Can I, using LPM, apply kernel patches & change build options for packages? Other

  • It's finally happened... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dynastar454 ( 174232 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @03:16PM (#5632483) Homepage Journal
    "Given your previous interest in Progeny, I thought you would..."

    It was just a matter of time... Slashdot has finally merged into one collective conscious. Maybe now we can take on Microsoft! :-)

  • Not stable enough? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jellybob ( 597204 ) on Monday March 31, 2003 @03:21PM (#5632507) Journal
    Hmmm, anyone else find it kind of ironic that the "Linux Platform Company" shows their software demo being run on IE under Windows XP? /me thinks they need to do a little work on their desktops :P
    • I very much hope that they actually use a 'real' distribution for much of their work. However, the fact that it works under IE could be important for many of their customers (we certainly assume it functions under Mozilla).

      I'd rather someone run Word on CrossOver Xandros than on XP. One step atta time one step atta time...

    • well, no surprise considering the pdf file was created with "Acrobat Distiller 5.0.5 (Windows)" and titled "Microsoft Word - PlatformServicesWP_031703". call me cheap, but even under windows i use win32 ghostscript to convert ps (generated by adobe's free-beer postscript driver using "print to file") to pdf. sure, using my poor man's method i don't get hyperlinks, but notice that none of the urls in the pdf are hyperlinks either, though i'm sure distiller is capable of such.

      sure progeny's head is ian mur
  • A nice ultra-localized distro would be a good project for a high school (or college, or middle school).

    Similar to the way C. Knopper includes slides from his talks and some (interesting) Free Software-oriented music on Knoppix, such a distro might include ...

    - a "yearbook" with photos of all students who want a photo in there and some fun snapshots

    - a selection or two (as oggs) from the school jazz band, choral groups, orchestra, student-formed rock bands, whatever

    - a school directory. When I switched s
    • Or they could just set up a school website... This is a good example of needlessly including linux, when there are better, easier tools that would make the same result. I know linux is cool, but for each and every use you cited, its an overkill and frankly a dumb idea.
  • Statements such as (Emphasis added):
    • Our componentized base system
    • Our componentized kernel
    • Installation technologies, based on Progeny's PGI installer-creation toolkit.
    • Integrated hardware-detection support, based on Progeny's Discover 2.0
    • Note that the custom platform built and delivered using Linux Platform Manager contains only Progeny-managed platform components

    make it sound like you are trading vendor lock in by an "evil distribution" with selling your soul to Progeny.

  • A distro where you can select what gets installed. I'm not sure about other distros, but in SuSE, during the installation, just deslect everything, and select only those things which you need. Then everything that those programs depends on is also automatically installed. Easy as that. Plus, with SuSE, there's an automatic network installer, just as RedHat has one. So it sounds to me as if they're doing nothing but repackaging ideas that already exist and claiming them as their own. And as to the custom ker
    • This is for people who install 200 Workstation with the same setting for a Call Center or Register system in 50 Locations. Yes most of this can be done with RedHat using kicker but that is all done with a text config file that you have to change for you site. Then you have to do something about keeping it updated. They have developed a simple webbased system for that. The Real Question is cost and mantaince for the system.
  • Is it just me, or is this picture [progeny.com] pretty similar to Ximians logo [ximian.com]?
    Just mirrored.

    It actually thought that I saw a code monkey :)
  • I find the ptk.progeny.com website useful. This sounds like a similiar type of deal but for Linux instead of development tools.
  • read my sig...

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