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Debian

Stormix Bankruptcy 102

Posted by michael from the for-whom-the-bill-tolls dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "So has the news that Stormix has filed for bankruptcy been covered? I was surprised to get a form letter in the mail today from Deloitte & Touche saying they filed for bankruptcy on Jan. 17. And they owe me $20." The Stormix users mailing list has some information, and Newsforge has a summary. I'm typing this on a Stormix system right now, so I hope someone picks it up and maintains the distro.
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Stormix Bankruptcy More

Stormix Bankruptcy

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  • Could we please have some hard facts? There is no real reporting at the newsforge link. At least not a scan, or a verification of the letter. Hello, when I want unsubstantiated rumours, I'll just read /. It appears newsforge just copied the text from the Storm discussion boards.

    Now, I'm not saying that Storm is going into the crapper; I'm just saying that as of yet, all I've seen is two copies of the same letter typed in by some yabo on the internet (I'm sure there is a good chance you are legit, so don't bother flaming. But until I see a scan with the DeLoitte and Touche stationary, I'll keep holding my breath.)

  • I disagree with this.

    Stormix did a lot for Debian. They created a *nice* installer, put some good setup and administration tools with it. Wrote the *best* manual I have ever seen come with a Linux distribution, and provided excellent commercial support.

    I ran stormix for quite a bit, and it was definatly one of the better distros out there.

  • Debian? Never heard of it. Weird that I mentioned it in my post. Wonder how that happened?
  • I think you're being a little unfair comparing LinuxOne to Stromix and Mandrake. Both had *real* shipping products, both added *real* customized software (installers) to there choosen base system, unlike LinuxOne that took Redhat's Distribution and changed "REDHAT" to "LinuxOne" -- and not over the entire base either

  • This is what it's all about really - Darwinism and survival of the fittest. If Stormix had totally kicked ass to the point that everyone took notice and lots of began actually using it, it would still be around. Common sense. Some distros are bound to go the way of the toilet while others flourish.

    Thank god for what we do have - a plethera (sp?) of distributions left to choose from. Unfortunately the same rule is working against the open source community in the kingdom of the web browser. I personally believe that is our biggest hurdle to overcome, not faltering distros of Linux. Redhat, Debian, Slackware and Mandrake aren't going down anytime soon. AFAIK.

  • I don't know. I've always kind of liked Storm. I'll miss them, it was a good distro. They were great for giving to people that don't know Linux and just want to get started with it.


    -MunKy_v2 [dialug.org]
  • StormPKG is in Debian unstable right now and works like a charm...I would like to see SAS too, but some parts of Storm are making it over.

    It would be nice if some people picked up the other storm parts and became maintainers from them in Debian....are their any other nifty storm software other than stormpkg, SAS and the installer (which I wouldn't think Debian would want as they are working on their own)
  • Most of that stuff is already available in Debian. KDE is now included, but of course you can choose KDE or GNOME. Apache, sure. Apache mod_ packages for ssh, perl, python, ruby, tk, and DAV. There is a menu utility, yes. I didn't notice webmin and mod_php, but of course anyone could package these for Debian.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • I am going to sound antagonistic here, but I have to point out a few things which you should very definitely have done differently:
    1. Debian's unstable, right now, is just that: unstable. I'm fairly experienced with Debian, but I had some severe issues making it work. As in, I had to reformat and re-install. It was that bad. Using unstable can cause that to happen though, and shouldn't be done unless you're ready to do just that.
    2. rpm does work on Debian (apt-get install rpm). However, the dependency database will be quite thoroughly out of whack. Ignore it. As long as you are sure you have the dependencies installed, you can force install any rpm and expect it to work. Proof: I'm running Win4Lin on Debian, even though it's only provided in rpm format, and has a dependency on /bin/sh. And it works wonderfully.
    3. XF864: I had to edit the startup scripts so that it would accept tcp connections. That may have been what was happening for you.
  • Well I was suprised, and yes they do change someone else's distro and change it. But so does Mandrake, LinuxPPC, SuSe, and alot of other distros. I was very impressed with storm, not only was it easy to install and configure, but it merged well with deb's ( since it was based on debian ). It was what turned me on to how cool debian was, infact i was planning on wiping this RH 6.2 box, and installing storm. And the firewall management tool was a really cool product. At the place i worked over the summer they needed a replacement for their old NetBSD firewall on a p120 that was crashing constantly. So I setup a nice little linux box, with ipchains. But the staff wanted to be able to change things easily after I was gone. And since most of them were the "windows only" crowd.. they couldn't navigate a shell if their life depended on it. So i went out and spent $99 on the Stormix firewall and installed it. Now they had a great way to configure firewall rules without me, and from what I heard last they machine hadn't crashed once, with an uptime of 2 months. I really think that Stormix was a *great* distro, it really saddens me to see it go under ( i know it's still a possibility, but it's not looking good ) Hopefully some of their tools will not die and will live on in the community. Stormix, you will be missed.
  • I'm definetly in favor of naming software versions after the release date, rather than any other scheme... Versioning has become useless, as linux companies indiscriminantly add numbers to their releases just to keep up with the other companies, or when Solaris goes from 2.6 to 7 in one revision.

    It fails to make any sense. Let's just have Linux 12/2000 (2.4), Windows 8/2001 (2000 SP4, probably), and be done with it.
  • but too bad they made it difficult to find out about configurations and pricing. Why couldn't they have made the pricing information available on their website and print advertisements? I was in the market for some 1U/2U servers last month and I really would prefer *not* to have to call some salesdroids to get quotations. You just know that as soon as you're in a salesdroid's database you'd never get them to leave you alone. I wonder how much this drove away potential sales for them. I know it turned me away...

  • I'm on the MaxLinux network and recently noticed that Stormix stopped running ads with them -- it should have been pretty obvious to me.

    Also, I was contacted by the parent company of Stormix, a company that does web hosting and domain registration -- so I wasn't aware that Stormix was its own entity.

    Very gloom year so far for the Debian distros.

  • hmm, I really liked stormix. I have been using SuSE since 4.4.1 and debian always seemed kinda strange to me, but Stormix looked like a good distro with a nice installer and a few config tools. The only thing that stopped me from using Stormix was that their box costs money and I could get SuSE for free from my university's ftp server or through their beta-tester program... I am using progeny now on my vaio and it seems to be a nice replacement for stormix...
  • I read the releases at progeny and am actually downloading it as we speak. Since I don't personally see anything wrong with Debian's installer, ease of use etc. my interest is in their NOW technology (especially Pelican).

    What would be even more compelling though would be an uderlying, Beowolf style, aggregation of computational load across the NOW structure. Wishful thinking I guess . . . but you gotta admit it will be coooooool.

    Smells like Cheese! I'm getting outta here!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Unless I'm sadly mistaken I believe that phrase has always been the formal leagalize for the process in Canada. We don't file chapter 11, we "seek protection from creditors". Frankly it's at least more descriptive then filing chapter 11, which is simply obscure :)


    --
    Remove the rocks to send email
  • While Mandrake is pretty pro-kde (not that there's anything wrong with that)the installer and config tools are written in Perl with Gtk bindings.
  • What comes around goes around.

    I believe in the pureness of the fact that the only distributions to "survive and thrive" will be the ones that saw 1's and 0's in the early days -- rather than $$ dollar $$ signs of late.

    Long live Debian & Slackware...Oh yea -- and long live REAL rock & roll...
  • If you think something's lacking from Debian unstable and you would like to fix it, start here [debian.org].

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Not only that, but it is possible to apt-get from Stormix to Progeny, without having to reinstall your whole system. Definitely something to look into for ex-Stormix users. Read this page [progeny.com] for info.

  • However, I have to defend the quality of Stormix, and disagree that it's a 2nd-tier vendor in quality. (In market success is another matter -- guess it sounds like they're having at least some serious trouble right now ... fmaxwell is completely correct in noting that a *combination* of factors is really what matters) Stormix (along with Mandrake) is one of the easiest distros to install, gets X working quickly, has intelligent disk tools, and seems to have an overall *clean* approach -- not as software heavy as SuSE or many others, it's true, but the result is a nice, useable system.

    A common view seems to be that Storm's financial failure came in spite of its technical excellence, but I would suggest that it actually came because of it.

    Let me explain: Stormix was basically Debian plus a newbie-friendly installation and some GUI configuration front-ends. In my opinion, this was a great idea for a project...but maybe not for a company.

    You start with Debian, a system that automagically updates and configures itself, and then you make it accessible a broader range of users with pretty GUI tools.

    What you end up with is a very happy user with a very nice system who has absolutely no need to ever purchase an upgrade or support.

    To make it worse, Storm lacked a target market and the marketing ability to reach that market. RedHat is the server distribution, Mandrake is the newbie/desktop distribution, SuSE is the lots-of-software distribution, Debian is the Free distribution. What is Stormix?

    Storm's existence was a big benefit to the larger Linux community. The consolation for us is that their GPL'ed work can continue...hopefully it will quickly make its way back into Debian. The big losers, I suppose, are the excellent technical people who worked at Storm. They certainly didn't deserve this fate. Their contributions are appreciated; best of luck to them.

  • Or is it probably a good news? It is well known that current Debian-based distributions do not do as well as Debian itself for quite a number of aspects, especially policy compliance and security fixes rate. The fall of Corel and Stormix will pave an easier road for Propency to grasping the small Debian-based market and give it an easier start.
  • I'd say Stormix wasn't exactly your typical "marginal distro." Stormix, aside from Corel (which has its own set of issues), was about the most novice friendly Debian distro available - it was perfect for people who wanted to stay away from Redhat's bugs and packaging system, Suse's bloat, Mandrake's over-coddling, etc. - but were intimidated by other Debian distros.

    I'm sorry to see Stormix go because it was the one Debian distro that I could recommend to Windows users for switching to Linux. To me, Sotrmix was friendly enough to let people learn Linux on Debian to start with, rather than switching after taking the time to learn the idiosyncracies of other distros.

  • Except that new versions of windows aren't distros any more than Slack 4 is a different distro from Slack 7.1. It's all Windows, and it's all Slack. Then again, with M$'s fscked up versioning system, where the number jumps from 3.11 to 95 when it should've been to 4.0, then to 98 when it should still be 4.1 or 4.2 (sorry, kids, but I just can't consider a driver update a new version.) It's hard to tell what's what in the Windows world anymore. . .
  • Man, Most embaracing typo yet. And in the title too.. Guess I fit right in here..

    Anyway, I've proof-read it now, and am reposting:

    REPOST:

    This is really sad.

    While the original Storm Linux was a little rough, and had many installation issues, their newest version (Rain 2.0.6) is absolutely fantastic.

    The installer is very slick, and SAS and StormPkg are great tools! I use them all the time. I installed Stormix and immediately upgraded to Woody without a hitch.

    My question is why doesn't the Debian community pick up their great stormpkg apt front-end and run with it? All of their stuff was GPL'd. To be honest, I really can't see the difference between what Stormix was and what Progeny is hoping to be.

    As for someone else picking it up and maintaining it, I really hope that Debian takes a close work at the work they did. It was great.

    Stormix was what got me on to Debian. Since then I've taken the time to get accustomed to it, and I honestly believe that I'll stick with a Debian based distro forever.

    This is very sad. They had a very good product. I wish the people well in their future endeavours.

    Nice T-shirt!

    Ben

    END REPOST

    Now, a question: I'm thinking that it might be interesting to try to grab their distro and make a new one out of it, similar in concept to Corel's in that it only uses the best of Linux software be default.

    Would anyone out there be interested in working with me on it?

    I'm thinking Stormix (So Debian) based with the newest versions of the following apps:

    - Linux Kernel
    - XFree
    - KDE
    - Gimp
    - XMMS
    - Some development tools
    - Gnometoaster for CDR creation
    - Not much else

    We could cover all of the bases with only the best available, and add a few custom tools where needed.

    Maybe I'm crazy for suggesting this on Slashdot, but it's just an idea. I'm honestly not looking for a flame here... I'm getting to the end of my degree and am looking forward to what I might do afterwards..

    Cheers,

    Ben

  • Re:Life sometimes sucks. (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And the people who point to that problems that linux companies are having are missing one very important thing:
    Two-thirds of all small businesses fail within the first three years. So it looks to me that we're seeing exactly what we should be.

    Shalon Wood

  • Comment removed (Score:4)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @08:44AM (#477246)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Try progeny.

  • Re:Stormix was not a parasite (Score:4)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Saturday January 27, 2001 @10:00AM (#477248) Homepage Journal
    No, Stormix was not a parasite. They GPL-ed their software and their package manager is now part of Debian. They had real, shipping product, not mock-ups like LinuxOne. It happens that they had one really bad executive, and an otherwise good team. But that's not what sunk them, the capital market did.

    Bruce

  • No, that's not what they said. But there's some truth in there. Unix got fragmented and didn't have a license like the GPL to make it possible to merge fragments. It got sold from company to company like a pork belly on the commodity market, which hardly gave business users confidence. And it was expensive, and proprietary.

    Now, aren't you glad that Linux isn't Unix? :-)

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Storm Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Storm Linux, it's time to close the windows." ...and lock the doors and turn-out the lights, we're outa here.. :)

  • I actually do like the concepts behind Debian, and the fact that it's not as commercial as some of the other releases. Unfortunately, it doesn't measure up to the pure level of usability that other distributions are at. I tried it last week for 2 days and it didn't want to cooperate.

    I installed it from a local FTP mirror. The installation went fine and dandy. I would have preferred an ISO image, but I didn't find one on the local FTP mirror. Anyways, that wasn't a major problem and the system was installed within a fairly short time.

    Everything went fine until I tried to set up the XFree86 system. Then everything seemed to fall over. I have the i810 chipset at work where I was attempting to install the Debian system...the version of XFree86 they had didn't support it. I knew this from dealing with the same problem under Red Hat. But unfortunately, Intel only provides Red Hat specific patches. somehow on their site.

    The next step was to change what the Debian folks call the "/etc/apt/sources.list"...so I changed it to unstable and downloaded all of the updated packages, including XFree86 4.0.2 which has support for i810. Unfortauntely half the the deb packages failed to install, so I went into the archives directory manually and installed all of the packages which were showing failed dependencies. That seemed to work and after running apt-get update-dist a few times more, all the packages were sucessfully installed.

    So I tried the new XFree86 system....but all I got was "Waiting for X11 to accept connections ..............(screen was soon full of dots). Note that this was several hours later. I reinstalled and tried everything again the next day, but I didn't have any luck.

    In retrospect, I have had much better luck with Mandrake, Red Hat and SuSE.
  • I'm running Stormix right now, which I like a lot but if I can't get updates to the Storm specific packages I guess that I'm sort of stuck. I can apt-get upgrade the debian packages but if the Storm packages don't get updated they'll start breaking after a while I assume. I have to say I was pretty impressed with Storm Linux as it added the things that debian was/is missing like a good installer/gui package manager/gui admin tools etc.
  • It goes beyond risk. If you let the creditors suck a dying company dry, then they'll get pennies on the dollar and shut the company down.

    If you can convince a judge that you might get your act together, you can get bankrupcy protection. That means that you can help off from the creditors and try to make money, then you work out a system to pay them back.

    This is in the lenders best interests (you didn't think the laws were to protect commoners). For example, say I am one of 10 creditors for a company that owes $10m, and has $1m on hand. They might have money coming in (could pay back in two years). Protection helps us all.

    Why can't we do this independently? There is a hold-up problem. Say that I am owed $5m, and cut a deal to be paid back. Someone owed $250,000 demands payment, and they'd get paid in full, (while I get nothing). A few of those situations, and the $1m on hand could be sucked out, leaving the company unable to make payroll and going under.

    Even if there weren't people that could be paid, we'd have a problem. Imagine a company with 2 creditors for $10m. They owe one of them $8m, and one $2m, and they have $1m on hand. The $8m agrees to hold off payments so the company can try to pay in full. The $2m company now decides to collect, forces the company into bankrupcy and takes the $1m (because the big boy agreed to put off payments). This would be a mess. The lesser debtor could blackmail the big debtor into transferring debt, because all they can get is $800,000 from them both filing, or $0 from not filing, and that isn't right.

    The courts protect creditors from each other more than protecting those that lost it all.
  • It would be a damn shame, maybe some of their GUI tools could be made part of Debian.
  • I scanned in my copy of the first and last page of the letter I got from Deloitte & Touche. See them here: http://www.geocities.com/pancake_1968/main.html [geocities.com]
  • The problem with Red Hat Linux -- and all current Linux distributions -- is that Linux is not an operating system. Linux is a kernel. Lots of people have thrown together a bunch of random tools on top of that kernel and sold it as "Linux" (it should probably be called GNU-MIT-BSD-Linux), but it remains a set of random tools tossed on top of that kernel. The problem with a bunch of random tools gathered from all over is that keeping them up-to-date and working well together becomes exponentially harder as the number of tools grow. That, amongst other reasons, is why many commercial software vendors choose to re-invent the wheel rather than use the many available Open Source software libraries such as OpenSSL and libgmp. My own bigmath module may suck compared to libgmp, but I can at least insure that it will continue to work with my application. I have no such assurance with libgmp (and libgmp is hairy enough to compile that I can't assure that old versions of libgmp will continue to work with new versions of the various operating systems we support -- how will it work on an IA-64, for example?).

    The wonder is that Red Hat Linux/SuSE Linux/etc. continue to be usable. The fact that they have bugs is undeniable and unavoidable, given the fact that they are random grab-bags of Open Source software, rather than being an operating system. If you want an operating system, get FreeBSD. Of course, this does not assure bug-free operation either (FreeBSD has had some rather annoying spontaneous reboot problems as of late, that keep coming and going), but you'll probably be more stable.

    I, of course, run Red Hat Linux 7.0 on my personal system. That's because I love playing with a bunch of unstable bleeding edge software, I'm a techie, it's my curse. That does not mean I would implement Red Hat 7.0 on a production system though.

    -Eric

  • oh good grief. Just because selling free software doesn't work doesn't mean that Windows is better than Linux. Linux will survive just fine without any companies selling it!

    Have fun using an inferior OS for about the silliest reason I've ever heard.
  • Stormix actually had a decent product. I think there were a couple of things that hurt them:

    1. Too much promotional material! I beta tested for these guys and, though it started with just a burned CD, I ended up with a boxed copy of their first shipping product, multiple stickers, a t-shirt (wearing right now actually), and probably other things that I can't recall.
    2. Think about it: they marketed their product in Canada! I know Linux supports a plethora of platforms, but the sad truth seems to be that it still hasn't been ported to the pine/tree architecture. I'm sure the four to five Canadian Linux users will rise up in arms against my comment, but seriously, I never saw a single ad for Stormix or noticed the box carried in computer stores. Then again, I live in Kansas - one of the few places technologically inferior to the Great White North. At least CompUSA has a *nix section... not that their employees know what it is.
  • So someone makes a Linux dist. and then someone takes that dist. and adds more stuff to it, if there's money in that then Linux is a real goldmine.
    They should do what everybody else is doing, join their forces. Make it a part of Debian, unless it totally sucks that is(I wouldn't know haven't tried Stormix), when the death is only natural. Kill it if it can't fly.

    --------
  • Weaker distro's will simply go down the toilet, while distro's which give people what they want, will succeed. Do we really care about a marginal distro ? We still have redhad, debian, suse, etc etc.

    Personally speaking, this is a sad day, since anything that competes with the Redmond Retards has to be a good thing, but in the grand scheme of things, will we really care in say three months time ?

  • >No other distribution even comes close to Mandrake in this respect,

    Was that meant to be a joke?

    I tried Mandrake and got pissed at its winblows
    "The user is a moron" mode. There are some
    moronic setups which are not that simple to
    get rid off. If they would document all the
    hidden bullshit it would make it usefull.
    Take the numlock shit they came out with in
    version 5.3. It took a while to figure out
    the offending script that was forcing the
    numlock on on every login despite the fact that
    it was clear in the bios that the goddam numlock
    was to be turned off.
    Now they have a "smart hardware identification"
    on boot. What if I don't want the damm thing
    to look for changes in my hardware everytime it
    boots? If I'd wanted a crawling boot I would
    have installed winblows.

    I switched to SuSE with no regret.
    I haven't seen anything yet that is as nice
    to setup as SuSE 7.0 Professional.

  • Not a good month for Debian-based distributions (Score:3)

    by locutus074 ( 137331 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @08:01AM (#477264)
    So this month, we receive news that Stormix is declaring bankruptcy while Corel is selling off their operating system division. Not a good month. :)

    I hope that people don't get the wrong impression about Debian from this. It's really kick-ass; but I'd prefer a little more eye candy. What I'd really like to see is something like a Debian-based Mandrake. That'd be really cool.

    It's a damn shame; I used Stormix for a bit, and it showed promise.

    --

  • Mandrake users know Mandrake is cool. SuSE users know SuSE is cool. Storm users know Storm is cool. You don't know s#|t and you're a poor troll. LANFU.

    Mandrake 7.2 and KDE 2 for me? for free?
  • I'm typing this on a Stormix system right now, so I hope someone picks it up and maintains the distro.

    Yeah, someone will be maintaining it. They're called Debian. :-P

  • Life sometimes sucks. (Score:3)

    by pc486 ( 86611 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @08:02AM (#477267) Homepage
    The fact that Storm Linux seems to be going bankrupt is not something that should seem unusual. There is quite a bit of competition in the distro world of Linux for a relitivly small market; RedHat, Slackware, SuSe, Turbo, Debian, and other distros provide stiff competition. The good news is that bankruptcy isn't the end of a company. I'm just hoping that Storm Linux will contiune to put out products. Competition is more often than not good for an industry as it premotes the growth of Linux by providing selection of a product that meets one's needs.

  • i just installed stormix the other day, not bad (i know, 99% debian)...but i was kinda concerned when it wouldn't recognize my sound blaster (doh)

    i'm stickin to debian


    --

  • Don't you think there are already many maintainers? ;)
  • Stormix is a Debian derivative. Right now it is being very difficult to get capital, which is what probably sunk them. However, Progeny [progeny.com] is doing well, and with Ian Murdock (the Debian founder) and a number of the lead Debian developers there, Progeny will carry the torch for Debian in the business world. I am associated with the company and am thus prejudiced, although I am not their official spokesperson and I don't work for them - this oosting is opinion.

    Reviews of the Progeny install have been very good (go to ftp.progeny.com/pub/progeny/ [progeny.com] and download the CD image), and this ease-of-use addition will be a real boost to Debian.

    I'm sorry to hear about Stormix, but there's been an ex-Storm person at Progeny for a while, and I hope the other good people from Storm get to move over.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • How come a company like Stormix, with a real product can be so unfortunate to have this happen to them, yet fly-by-night LinuxOne can continue to exist?
  • Do we really care about a marginal os? Everything has to start somewhere, otherwise we would all be condemned to the one os (I think you know which one I'm talking about:).
  • I was just thinking out loud about yet another Linux distro. Sorry. Sounds too corny re-reading. I think I need another cup of coffee..

    Ben
  • While Mandrake itself is KDE2-biased with regard to its default desktop environment, the configuration tools are all written using gtk+.
  • This is a good point -- markets don't simply support an infinite number of vendors of *any* products, whether software, cars, sliced cheese products, etc. The fact that Free software is supporting at least temporarily a pretty broad range of vendors is amazing (to me at least, guess I'm easily amazed;) ), and Yes, hard to deny that there will be continuing globbing of these companies ...

    However, I have to defend the quality of Stormix, and disagree that it's a 2nd-tier vendor in quality. (In market success is another matter -- guess it sounds like they're having at least some serious trouble right now ... fmaxwell is completely correct in noting that a *combination* of factors is really what matters) Stormix (along with Mandrake) is one of the easiest distros to install, gets X working quickly, has intelligent disk tools, and seems to have an overall *clean* approach -- not as software heavy as SuSE or many others, it's true, but the result is a nice, useable system.

    I hope this is a glitch and not the last word from Stormix. (Time will tell etc)

    timothy
  • (sp?) Yup, Plethora.

    DISCLAMER:
    This spell check was brought to you by the guy who accidentally wrote home-groen in the title. Take it at face value.

    Ben
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ...the menu utility that keeps the app menu across desktop managers consistent...

    Actually, the update-menus tool actually comes from Debian. As someone who used Mandrake for several months before switching to Debian, I find it works much better in Debian.

    The reason? While Mandrake has made its packages populate /usr/lib/menu/, the Mandrake user still often finds himself relying on Red Hat packages, and packages maintained by third parties. Thus, instead of having his menus automagically update themselves, he ends up with yet another set of text files to maintain by hand.

  • For more information, please see the Stormix-users [stormix.com] mailing list. Scroll down a bunch to get to the bankruptcy threads.

    You might find this message thread [stormix.com] particularly interesting...

    --
  • I guess that the obvious thing to say would be, OK if its so easy, have you done it? But a more useful thing to point out is that packaging is one of the harder things to do in Software Development. I work in software testing of enterprise middleware and really a big percentage of bugs come from packaging mistakes and 3rd party compatability and not in coding mistakes. Think about all the issues with compilers, interpreters, virtual machines, orbs, etc. that seem to change daily. And then think about getting ever last little header file and config file in the right place and at the right version. And then for an OS think about hardware support; multiply the number of CPU types, motherboard chipsets, BIOSs, bus types, sound cards, video cards, network cards, protocals, CDRs, Tape Drives, etc, together and you get a huge number of combinations.
    Yes I'm sure it's easier to come up with an OS when you start with such a well designed system as Debian espesially because it has the deb/apt package system but I can't see how you whould think that that was a trivial project. And I havn't even gotten to the subject of Support, even if you do throw out your own distribution are you going to support it and fix bugs and solve customers problems with it?
  • What a sick notion. You make it sound like the creditors are evil, greedy attackers rather than the people and institutions that trusted Stormix and loaned them money. What would you think if you lent someone money and they went to court to try to keep from repaying you? Would you view the court as a "protector"?

    Here's to reviving debtor's prison! Let's shift more of the burder in loans to the lendee, further skewing the financial balance of powers!

    Sarcasm aside, bankruptcy exists for a very good reason. Without it, freedom can be irrevocably linked to financial health. Any creditor enters into a financial agreement with trust, but also with the knowledge that *any* financial investment involves risk.

    It's a choice to lend money. And sometimes you lose.

    The bankruptcy system is sometimes abused (see home ownership rules in Florida, recently, and default rates on law student loans), but on the whole, I'm glad it exists...

  • Lack of option (Score:3)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @01:08PM (#477282)
    I was just thinking today how much I was looking forward to the next installment of Stormix while helping someone fdisk their windows partition and install Mandrake 7.2. While KDE2 looks as slick as penguin poo, I had some issues with it in general. Dependancies. This individual had found a program on freshmeat that he wanted to install, in RPM form. Ok, good so far - he doesn't have to compile it. That's a big roadblock for beginners who are used to foolish click-click-click-done installations. So, we 'rpm -Uvh' the program, and we get dependancy errors. A pain in the butt, but we get through it. But the point is, it's a huge pain - there was a tree about 3 or 4 deep of dependancies I had to pull from the CD. I couldn't just 'apt-get install libpng' (for example) I had to find everything that that paticular item needed, etc etc. It turned him off slightly.

    Now, Stormix didn't really have that issue. IMO, the main issue that Stormix had was that you had no option on initial install via the penguin-poo slick GUI to install, say, more advanced programs. You had to find them on the CD afterwards and install them, and there wasn't a large array of programs available via initial install. IMNSHO, they could have simply had the 'extra' programs under a second sub-menu, say, as 'extras', or 'more programs', with a notice that the main programs would not be enough for most people, and then go on to label the 'extra' programs under a category as say, "CD Burning Tools" and install them all in that manner. I'd say that was quite possibly the biggest fallacy of Stormix, as far as usability is concerned.

    I was thinking today that, if Stormix realeased, say, Stormix 2001, they would likely base it off Mandrake, but base it off of apt, possibly with their own custom db of packages. (i586, anyone? I certainly notice a huge speed difference with optimized packages.)

    If that were to be done - a apt based Mandrake distro with a more sensical installer for beginners (keepin' it technical for us geeks at the same time) I think everyone could be happy. (RedHat wouldn't have much to hold to that - what got them in the lead was their RPM w/ early acceptance of X and such.)

    *sigh* Well, I hope Stormix continues to be worked on by someone. If for no other reason, that boot logo was tatz. ;)

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • Linux Linux Linux... (Score:3)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @01:19PM (#477283)
    Just my note to all those burgeoning 'linux admins' out there..... especially those who argue over what the 'best' distro is all the time, or what one they will use 'forever' or 'from now on'.

    Some facts:

    1) There have been several linux distros over the years, and have had a rise and fall (and rise and fall etc...) in popularity. lsl. mcc. slackware. debian. redhat. Suse. + all the spinoffs/oneoffs...

    2) There's more to unix on the x86 than Linux... and more platforms than x86.

    Now.. really, instead of all these efforts.. why not put some effort into some actual computing instead of arguing about what's a better distro, or tweaking your desktop for the 1000th time? Do a bit of code. Ever installed FreeBSD before? OpenBSD? NetBSD? Go scam a copy of Solaris x86 and learn what it's all about... I'm not saying any are as 'good' as linux at the things you probably expect them to be.. but...

    What I'm saying is.. it seems to me a lot of pro-linux people nowadays are getting to be as bad as any other OS-worship crowd.. they paint themselves into a little corner instead of looking at computing in general. You think it's a big linux world.. but it's not.. there is a lot more out there.

  • I didn't notice webmin

    Well it was there at the end of October last year (I remember installing it :o) -- but then it disappeared off the package list.
    Does anyone know what happened to it?
    - Derwen

  • From the NewForge story:

    ----
    This doesn't necessarily mean Stormix is going to immediately shut down; many businesses in both the United States and Canada file bankruptcy as a temporary measure while they get their financial act together or look for a more stable company to buy them.
    ----

    So maybe some company (Progeny, whoever buys/bought Corel Linux, some other Debian derivative, etc) may decide to buy Stormix, and get the talent, IP and name... or maybe they just need to refinance -- hmmm, anyone want to put together a Stormix xonsortium? Didn't think so :-)

    rr

  • The point is, they should learn something outside of just 'linux linux linux'. Use those neurons to expand their horizons.

    I mentioned Sol x86 because I doubted a lot of kids in their basements would have a sparc laying around... and sol x86 is basically free ($20).
    Oh. And experience with it might really help them if they ever actually have to use solaris/sparc.

    I'd go on a tear about the 'parents basement' thing.. but it's not worth it ;)

  • ...you have to be at least as good as Debian, or nobody will notice you until the Slashdot headline says you're gone.

    Consider Corel a moment. Can you really take a distribution seriously that installs a network-connected machine without a root password? If they can't even get such a basic security feature right, what else didn't they do right?

    The last version of Stormix I looked at wasn't very impressive either.&nbsp I really only looked at the installer and this was back in October, however the install was very choppy and unnatural.&nbsp I actually believe Debian's potato installer is more friendly.

  • Can you say Progeny [progeny.com]?
  • This is really sad.

    While the original Storm Linux was a little rough, and had many installation issues, their newest version (Rain 2.0.6) is absolutely fantastic.

    The installer is very slick, and SAS asn StormPkg are great tools! I use them all the time. I installed Stormix and immediately upgraded to Woody without a hitch.

    My question is why doesn't the Debian community pick up their great stormpkg apt front-end and run with it? All of their stuff was GPL'd. To be honest, I really can't see the difference between what Stormix was and what Progeny is hoping to be.

    As for someone else picking it up and maintaining it, I really hope that Debian takes a close work at the work they did. It was great.

    Stormix was what got me on to Debian. Since then I've taken the time to get accustomed to it, and I honestly believe that I'll stick with a Debian based distro forever.

    This is very sad. They had a very good product. I wish the people well in their future endeavours.

    Nice T-shirt!

    Ben
  • Incompatibility with Debian Sicial Contract/Constitution? Anyway, one can always fetch it directly from Webmin's site -- stock package (.tar.gz) knows about Debian and can handle it without problem...
  • A few comments and remarks on your fiasco (in no particular order):
    1. RTFM. Really, it helps. You'd safe yourself a *lot* of trouble. Even though this does not help advocating Debian as the best.
    2. Never-ever move onto unstable until you get basic system up and running smoothly. By basic I do not mean debian-base. But I would not include X into base either. Get the system to the point of booting and working -- then move onto updating it to testing/unstable.
    3. Once your basic system is working, you can try and move to unstable. I would, however, urge you to first try testing -- it should mostly be stable, without packages breaking on each other. On the other hand, over the past 3 years that I run Debian, I had only 2 or 3 time faced sever package breakages... Well, when this happens I prefer to try and roll-back -- instll previous version.
    4. How can patches for Xserver be RH-specific? If they are RPM'ed (for whatever reason) -- use alien to convert to .deb and install them...
    5. With all due respect -- it is apt-get dist-upgrade

  • Really. If folks can slap some crap together that hardly works, and call it redhat 7.0, than almost any kiddie can use the "do it yourself distro builder" and do the same. however, without at least one major software vendor (like commercial sql, or commercial apps) backing you, you are put into the field of "Anyone can do this". Redhat is starting to sux0r, and its sad they have so much momentum by financers. time to get back to one or two distro's.. ==sam== free vulnerability assessment - vulnerabilities.org
  • Its easy, as long as you don't produce anything, or have any money to begin with, its hard to bankrupt.
  • StormLinux is the Mandrake of Debian, it is really a great OS for those who can't understand Debian's complicated installation, or use. It really is a shame. StormLinux2k had the power of potato, and the ease of use of Mandrake. We should seriously take up a fund, send them a check with a note and just say thanks.
    --------------------------------------
    I'm a karma whore, mod me up damn you!
  • We have Progeny [progeny.com] now, Stormix was mostly Debain+Newbie stuff(right?) - Progeny is doing well. Maybe they should just join up with them?

  • Re:Stromix Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You need to read NewsForge [newsforge.com] a little more regularly; saying LinuxOne still "exists" is like saying a flatlined patient whose heart and lungs are being operated by machinery is "alive."

    Here's the story [newsforge.com] they did about LinuxOne a little while ago.

  • I have applied there, operated by bunch of snot nosed kids and immigrants. Do not take me wrong, I am immigrant myself. Owner, however who is same as of netnation.ca takes it as a last measure to hire people with core canadians, americans and who have solid degrees - cheap labour. Everyone who comes to Vancouver by immigration process they get their picks at them first.
    Thank god I am not there!
  • I'm with you on this one. I got a free Stormix cd w/MaxLinux last year, and it was great. I'd been using Slackware before that, and the ease of installation was enough to take me away from it. The introduction to Debian was great too -- I abs. love apt-get install.

    Weird thing is that I really wanted to work for them (I live in Vancouver), but never got around to sending a resume...guess it was for the best.

  • some of their gui installers and enhancements were very cool.

    but it was all kde, and i could not seem to get it properly gnomeified...so i switched to debian.

    some of the stuff was broken...but they sure had a great support list.

    BTW, I think they are still seeking an infiusion of cash, and are close to breaking even, so I don't think I'd write them off just yet.

    Maybe we should slashdot the stores and rescue them? Just kidding.

  • I stand corrected. Thanks for setting me straight on that
  • I'm a RedHat guy, but used Stormix for a good while. And yes, it's great - the best of Debian with a decent installer, an good assortment of admin tools and an apt GUI that nobody had even touched in terms of quality.

    The problem with Stormix? Progeny. It'll be increasingly difficult to be a Debian-based commercial distro with Progeny and Ian Murdock and a good bunch of Debian core developers around. It's sad to say, but Progeny will be the only and one Debian-based commercial distro.

    And now we came to another point: for a long time, newcomers to the distro market made it RedHat-based; when it was exhausted people started to think that will be appearing Debian-based, but this January party has been over.

    Now capitalism started to say, "the fittest will survive". That's life in the capitalist lane.

  • Yeah, great. Except companies will have more incentive to release things that aren't ready so they can claim to be "newer" than the competitor's product.
  • As if that doesn't happen already.

  • Too bad... (Score:4)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Saturday January 27, 2001 @02:48PM (#477304) Homepage Journal
    Too bad... they had a nice, uh, logo.
  • Yes! Someone pick up their manual, change it a bit to make it the debian manual, and finally into a downloadable PS - and maybe give it to the openbooks projects?
  • Sorry Bruce,

    That's a nice theory, but I've just recently read about how it takes something like 16 months just to become an official debian contributor.

    That's a longe time.

    The other thing is that no matter how noble Debian's goals are, the community as a whole isn't overly focused on the end-user experience.

    I love Debian, but I've read too many arguments on how it should remain techincally difficult to install just to keep the barrier of entry high enough to ensure the "assume smart user" mentality og Debian.

    You know what, that's cool. If that's how Debian wants to run I support it 100%. I think that Debian's goal IS servers and experienced users. That leaves a place for the Progeny's, Corel's and Stormix.

    Cheers,

    Ben

    (A happy Debian GNU/Linux user for my PC and Alpha..)
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It no longer takes 16 months. That info is about a year old. They were not accepting new maintainers for a long time (when a volunteer organization gets up to 500 developers, expect growing pains). They put in a lot of automation to help them manage new maintainers as well as the existing ones.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • P.S. actual statistics regarding the time to become a Debian maintainer are at nm.debian.org [debian.org] .

  • What you have to realize is that I have installed and used several operating systems over the last few years, including several flavours of Linux, Solaris/SPARC, Solaris/Intel, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Windows NT 4, Windows 2000 and Real/32. I have NEVER had as many problems as I had with Debian the 2 days that I tried it than with any other operating system.

    This has now been compounded by the fact that I have had a rude Debian user (you) attempting to belittle me. However, this does not disturb me in the least. I have been a professional programmer for the last 2 years.
  • Dude,

    Don't let him torque you off. Debian is very user unfriendly in my experience also. I am from the BSD world, where even text installs JUST WORK. I found that the Distro that they are talking about in this article, Storm, was quite good. It had polish, and ease of use and configuration. It did most things correctly.

    If you want the good of debian, ie: massive variety, idealogical purity, etc, but the good of mandrake: ease of install, eye candy, just works. You need to try one of the deb based distros, and Storm was the best.

    I find that deb based distros handle dependencies more gracefully than rpms. You do have to get that apt-get list updated right though, and avoid unstable. They are REALLY unstable usually.

    Don't let the zealots get you down. They just don't know how to express their enthusiasm politely. Probably been working tech support with very stupid users for too long, and are in "talk down to the idiot" mode permanently.

    Cuchullain
  • It hasn't been a good idea for a regular machine for four or five years now (since 1.1 came out, iirc).

    There is no guarantee, nor even a tendency, for packages in unstable to get along, or stay in synch. They really mean "unstable"

    With weekly updates, I found that an unstable machine becomes completely unusable about twice a year, requiring a day or two to get back up.

    The solution is to use "testing," which is lagged two weeks from unstable so that the bombs can be removed . . .
  • I discovered Debian and Stormix too late. What a great installer and a solid distro. Problem is, I downloaded the ISO. I didn't buy it. I'll go to the store today and buy a copy, but again, it's too late.
  • I am sorry if my remarks have "belittled" you. Debian is also not the only Linux/*NIX disro I have ever used/installed. While I can agree that installation experience cannot be called the most pleasant of all, I don't believe that you are being fair to it either.

    Being a "professional programmer" does not add (nor eliminates) you any credibility -- I am *not* a programmer at all, but had never a single problem installing *any* operating system that I was interested in exploring (with an exception of OS/2 Warp).

    I am very sorry that you had such problems with Debian. At the same time I am having a problem understanding how (with all the experience that you are citing) it could possibly happen to a degree of pissing you of so much?..

    If you wan to continue this discussion off-thread, feel free to reach me via my [unprofessional, never finished] website.

  • Suse's bloat? I would hate to think of the useful stuff shipped with their distro as 'bloat'. True, some may be able to get by with a single cd that comes free with a Linux magazine and download the rest from an ftp archive somewhere, but it is really nice when you know what you need and can get it out of one dist. Yeah, it is too bad that Stormix went down. They had a nice setup that was easy for newbies, and a gentle intro to debian, but things happen. We in the Linux community must support each other as a whole, disregarding what distro each other runs, or else we become redmond fodder along with everyone and everything else that has ever surfaced in the digital realm and didn't conform.
  • I guess that explains why ftp.ca.debian.org doesn't point to ftp.stormix.com anymore...

  • I'm not sure what packages Debian comes with, but the typical Mandrake install involves a KDE2-centric set of configuration tools (though other desktop managers are available in the distro), Webmin, Apache's Adv. Extranet Server, Mod_SSL, Mod_PHP (v4.0.4pl1), Perl/Mod_Perl, OpenSSH.
    Plus there are other niceties in Mandrake, such as a utility for importing your Windows TTF fonts, the menu utility that keeps the app menu across desktop managers consistent, and I guess what would end up renamed as Debdrake Update. :)
    Just some ideas for anyone up to the challenge.
    Digital Wokan
    I wanted to spend 8 years defending the US constitution.
  • Just a moron.

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