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Progeny Debian Release Candidate 1 129

Posted by michael from the apt-get-goodness dept.
IanMurdock writes: "Progeny Debian Release Candidate 1 is available. Read the release information or go to the download pages."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Progeny Debian Release Candidate 1 More

Progeny Debian Release Candidate 1

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  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't know where you get that idea. First, KDE runs on other Unices, and is becoming more popular on platforms other than Linux. Second, Mandrake is now the top-selling/most downloaded Linux, and it's somewhat KDE-centric. (Though happily, Mandrake still gives you absolute choice.) I've seen more advancement with KDE, and more development of new apps for KDE than Gnome. Both have their pluses, minuses, adherents and detractors, but to say that KDE is "dying" or something is just plain silly.

  • Re:opportunity (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 16, 2001 @04:03PM (#358509)
    Debian developers are apt to get a woody when confronted by a frozen potato.

  • KDE is included with Prodney Debian. It is on the 2nd CD.

    .laz
    --
    My car is orange, my sig is not.

  • No, it does not support install to a reiserfs drive. You can, however, install the optional 2.4.2 kernel image and the reiserfs tools and make your reiser stuff afterwards. This is mostly because the boot floppies use a pretty stock 2.2.18 kernel.

    .laz

    --
    My car is orange, my sig is not.

  • Originally the plan was for it all to be on one CD. Eventually the CD sizes fluctuated up above 1 CD's worth, and the extras (second) CD had to be put together.

    You do not need the second CD to install Progeny Debian. It's just extra stuff like kde etc that didn't quite fit on the first CD.

    As it is now, I don't believe it will all fit on one CD. If it turns out to be close, I guess we'll try to tune it to fit on that one CD, but that remains to be seen.

    Don't listen to the guy who says it's non-free stuff or whatever... that's made up from what I can tell. It's made up of stuff that are in the "extra" package sets, which is not based on free or non-free (I believe netscape is the only non-free software shipping, though I cannot speak authoritatively on the subject).

    laz

    --
    My car is orange, my sig is not.

  • There were some recent articles (where?) on the net, with interviews from folks at ILM, PDI and Click2. They were ALL talking about the port of their beloved IRIX and Solaris code onto Linux.

    There were some folks with minor issues in comparing Linux PC's to Onyx2 and Origin boxes. Not bad for a platform that people were BEGGING for an alias port in '98!

    Of course, I cringe at thinking about all of those C shells...

  • TOY STORY!!! (Score:4)

    by Jeremiah Cornelius ( 137 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @05:49PM (#358514) Homepage Journal
    The Toy Story naming convention goes back to when Bruce Perens was head of the Debian Project...

    Bruce was the Systems Admin/Engineer for Pixar's network and RenderFarm (tm). Bruce went on to more SPI related stuff, and the ESR flamewars. Debian stuck with the cute release names.

    Sid - the horrible child who will blow your toys up - is the permanent name of the unstable package branch!

    Jeremiah

    Oh yeah, apt... Few team members agree on this one: A Package Tool/Advanced Package Tool/Aquisitive Package Tool. File this under FVWM.

  • I thought the license wars of KDE has been resolved and forgotten, so why not include KDE?

    I can live with GNOME apt-get, but what about KDE? Window Maker?

    Oh well, maybe next time...
  • I try following the link, all I get is timouts, and some really whacked-out ICMP failed checksum messages from my firewall from their IP. Is this some kind of "slashdot honeypot project" or something? =)
  • I'm gonna reinstall soon. Currently running 6.2 and have been running Red Hat since 4.1. But I've been contemplating trying other distros for a while. Perhaps now is the time....?

    RH 7.1 should be pretty sweet if they don't let too many bugs through. And the fact that they've had two betas for this cycle should help things somewhat.

    I'd *really* like to see a package list for Progeny. Any URLs for that? Thanks
  • Is freedom. Commercial or non-commercial is irrelevent to the goal of providing freedom. If we wanted Debian to not be commercialized, then we'd say so, rather than going out of our way to make sure that you have the freedom to commercialize it if you want.

    And, by the way, this is merely the latest in a list of commercial Debian-based systems. Not to mention all the individuals (like me) who have sold Debian-based solutions to people without bothering to make a separate system. I think your misplaced protests are a little late, as well as being way off-base.

    cheers

  • LOL! (Score:2)

    by Enahs ( 1606 )
    The thing is, I'd almost have to agree with you. I just made the Big Switch from Slack Linux to FreeBSD, and I've gotta say, I was impressed with autoslack. autoslack -iurs was all you needed to do to pick new packages, upgrade packages, delete deprecated. I think it compares (and I'm just now learning about FreeBSD; please be forgiving :-) favorably with tools such as pkg_add and family.
  • Hm. My experience has shown that many Debian users are lost when they can't apt-get install something, as if the Debian Faerie makes .debs or something. And no, that's not a troll or flame; I've really run into many a person that, when confronted with installing something that's not apt-gettable say, "Fuck no; I run Debian so I don't have to compile anything." Lazy, lazy, lazy.

  • Re:A Commercial Version of Debian (Score:5)

    by Sneakums ( 2534 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @04:09PM (#358521)
    The whole point of Debian is that it's not commercialized.

    Actually, the whole point of Debian is that it doesn't suck.

    --
    "Where, where is the town? Now, it's nothing but flowers!"

  • I don't think they're trying to bias users, I think they're simply incapable of pulling packages backwards through time. KDE 2.0 was the latest version available until a couple weeks ago. They had already frozen the set of packages to go into Progeny by then...

    --

  • The whole point of Debian is that it's not commercialized.

    Don't know much about Debian, do you. Check out Debian Weekly News, Jan 30 2001 edition, where you can see them unhappy that Corel is gone and Stormix is in trouble.

    In has, in fact, always been a dream and goal of the Debian project to form a solid basis for other distributions, including successful commercial distributions.

    --

  • It takes more than a few weeks to freeze a distribution. Anything less than a few months old in unlikely to be found on any Linux distribution unless the people putting together the distribution are reckless idiots...

    --

  • You've never heard of OpenCola.Life is stranger than Trolls!
  • Uh-oh. You said extra stuff like KDE. Hide, now!
  • Debian is a registered trademark. The rules are that you can't use the phrase "Official Debian" unless it's from Debian's CD master. You may use the name "Debian" on a derivative distribution.

    Bruce

  • You can update it from Debian. In fact, to get Progeny, you can add one line to your apt-sources file, and it will upgrade in-place from Debian, keeping the unmodified packages in place. I have once tested the corresponding downgrade back to pure Debian, it worked.

    Bruce

  • There are rules for the use of the Debian trademark and Progeny is following them.

    Bruce

  • The posterboard is the cover of the old Open Sources book. In an HP promotion at LinuxWorld, I gave away a few hundred copies. Kirk and I both wrote chapters, so we both got our names on the front. I have had my name on the same program with President Aristide of Hati and Prime Minister Kim Campbell of Canada. I guess that one was less deserved :-)Bruce
  • I agree that it's a bad idea to ask the Debian organization to support a commercial distribution, and Progeny isn't doing that. But Progeny Debian is indeed supposed to be Debian as far as the software you are getting is concerned. Sure, they added some stuff, but it is all DFSG-free and available to the Debian developers to incorporate into the main Debian tree. Also, the Debian packagers that Progeny employs are some pretty key ones. They maintain up to 50 packages per person. One of them mainains X, which is huge and pretty critical.

    Also, note that the Progeny CEO is the Debian founder, and is not one to "take advantage" of the volunteer developers, he is solidly behind the Debian way of doing things and actually created a lot of it. They also have me as chairman for a little while longer (although I have never worked there), and then I'll be on their advisory board, and I am the main author of the DFSG and again not someone to "take advantage" of volunteer developers.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Progeny is not making money off of your technical support, at least not yet, because they are not selling the distribution yet. Everything is free so far. Once they start selling, people will have an expectation of commercial support. I suppose some of what you have been seeing so far is due to the free nature of the pre-release system - there's no box with Progeny's phone number on it.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • No, Debian wants to be the basis of commercial distributions. It likes the people who duplicate Debian CDs and sell them, too. That saves Debian a whole lot of effort and gets them more users.

    The point of Debian is an entirely free system made by volunteers. That doesn't mean that it can't be sold or commercialized, as long as you always have the chance to get a free or cheap copy if you so desire.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • OK, I know where you are coming from, and at the same time when I read this I smiled and thought to myself "Gee, it really sucks to have users!".

    This has been a basic tension within Debian since it attracted the first non-hacker.

    Debian can't control who its users are and remain free. It's more important to be free.

    I'm one of those people who think world domination is a worthwhile goal. For that I'm willing to put up with a lot of naivete, I actually find the hackers-only crowd harder to deal with.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • KDE is included, but I think GNOME is their choice of GUI. They felt it was necessary to choose, but they didn't rule out KDE users. And the KDE war is so long over, folks. They have even made peace with RMS.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • The "testing" distribution is 15 days behind "unstable" and does not contain any packages for which critical bugs have been reported. It is a good compromise for folks who want new stuff and also don't want to run the risk of big problems.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • It's Debian with commercial support. I can think of some cases where volunteer support really won't work - like when large companies are using it for thousands of seats. It doesn't really seem fair, as others have pointed out, for the volunteers to be the first line of support for that. So Progeny is there to handle that. I agree that there is some danger of having Progeny users pop up on the volunteer support list and not really understand how to work with the volunteers, but I'd hope that this could be handled by having Progeny monitor those lists.

    Bruce

  • Well, consider it this way. Debian is a contraction of Deborah and Ian. Ian is the CEO of Progeny, Deb is his wife. So, who is using whose name :-)

    But quite seriously, I wrote the trademark rules back when I was Debian project leader, and this sort of usage was not only allowed but encouraged. We did not at that time realize that years later Ian and I would actually get money to form our own company.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Toy story names. (Score:3)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Friday March 16, 2001 @07:26PM (#358540) Homepage Journal
    Yes. I hear that two years after I left Pixar, they now use Linux in production. They were in a headlong rush toward NT when I left. Ironic, isn't it.

    Bruce

  • Re:progeny (Score:3)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Friday March 16, 2001 @07:45PM (#358541) Homepage Journal
    Aaargh! Although Ian and I are not currently Debian package maintainers, which means we each quit at some point, I think the word "defector" might give the impression that we are somehow hostile to Debian, nothing could be farther from the truth.

    Bruce

  • Re:i wonder (Score:3)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Friday March 16, 2001 @08:13PM (#358542) Homepage Journal
    I am running "unstable" pretty constantly for the last 5 years or so. It has broken to the point that something needed to be fixed before I could use the system 2 or 3 times. It still amazes me how well Debian works given that some developers have never even met another Debian developer. Of late, I have had to force the installer around a few situations where two packages claim the same file, but that is easy to do.

    Actually, I wish most software was as stable as Debian's "unstable". Sometimes the name seems like a tremendous overstatement.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Re:TOY STORY!!! (Score:4)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Friday March 16, 2001 @07:38PM (#358543) Homepage Journal
    I was never a sysadmin there. I was a systems programmer. My main projects were
    • The Pixar II Image Computer, for which I did a gate-array behavioral model used to verify a chip we were designing, some of the microcode, and all of the systems software.
    • The Iceman Imaging Language, for which I did the non-graphical part of the language design, the language internals, the framework for image processing in the second and subsequent rewrites, and the simpler 2-D processes like compositing and mathematical operators. Graphics and signal processing gurus did the more fancy imaging operators.
    • The port of the modeling software to Open GL.
    • Lived through at least 3 entirely different business plans, 4 rounds of layoffs, and 8 years in which we lost at least $40 Million. After all of that we finally made money.
    I spent 12 years there in all, after 6 years at the NYIT computer graphics lab and half a year doing radiology systems at Matrix Instruments. Much of my time at Pixar was fun, although there were some very stressful and frustrating years mixed in. I remain a systems programmer and never really got into graphics.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • Re:To be clear, (Score:5)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Friday March 16, 2001 @07:14PM (#358544) Homepage Journal
    Again, given that the Progeny executive team currently has the two first Debian project leaders as Chairman and CEO, who also happen to be the Debian founder, the founder of SPI, the author of the DFSG, the chance of alienation or "taking advantage" is rather low.

    Thanks

    Bruce

  • What would really help this situation would be a guide written for hackers that focuses on producing packages from tar.gz files. I know the packagers guide is there and I'm going to read it but on initial viewing it appears to be much larger than it has to be for merely a non-releasing packagers objective.

    Even if you have the chops you might prefer installing .debs over .tar.gz simply because it is easier to remove the .debs with dpkg then to go out and remove a ton of files installed by a tar.gz "make install". I've been dealing with this for mgetty simply because the package in debian is behind the current release and I have to have the current release (else the modem won't function properly). Would I rather make a .deb out of my mgetty source and install it? Hell yeah...

    If there happens to be such a guide please point it out! Maybe the packagers guide isn't so bad though - I'm off to find out.

  • Hi.

    I'm 99.99% sure that everything they're doing is GPL'd. I've been following them for a while and I'm sure that I'd read that.

    Check out debianplanet.org for interviews/reviews/discussuins with respect to Progeny.

    Personally, I think that Progeny's slick install/distro is a real boon for widespread Debian acceptance, but I hope they stick with a console-based install. Out of all of the fancy distro's available for my aging Alpha (It's an old picky 233) Debian's was the only one that went through without a hitch.
  • well, kde 2.1 is included in debian's unstable ("sid") branch, as well as gnome, windowmaker, etc. i'm running it (with antialiased fonts, xfree86 4.0.2 w/multihead) right now... kde 2.1 probably won't make the debian 2.3 release, but it should be in 2.4.
    --
  • When you get down to the real basics of the KDE / GNOME kerfuffle it's just good old-fasioned Nationalism - nothing more nothing less. Each has its place under the sun, but I wish this sort of sniping would simply stop and the protagonists start co-operating for a change.
  • wow, a well-done fp. good job. :)

    I haven't had a fp in around a year. I've had three in total, I think. but I've been here for a while, anyhow.
  • As someone who is involved with the provision of free (non-computer related) public services, I disagree deeply with your position.

    The only way you can forever avoid the issues that you say you fear Progeny will usher in, is for Linux to remain forever the province of the elitist hacker.

    Furthermore, I disagree with your assertion that purchasers of Progeny should be excluded from participation in the Debian community. You can help who you choose, of course, but isn't that kind of hypocritical? You're either in this to help people, or you're not.

    Indeed, if Progeny relies to a significant degree on community-based support to placate those who have purchased Progeny support, they will be a rapid and abysmal failure, and therefore an irritation only very briefly.

    For all your evident genuine concern for the Debian community, I see your posts on this topic here as hypocritical elitism, exclusionary ideas with little logical basis. If Progeny wants to sell freely available community-based tech support, let them try. It's been done before, and it doesn't work. It doesn't sound to me like that's the plan, though.

    If Progeny users want to frequent the lists, let them. As far as the structure of the software goes, there's no reason for them not to, and who knows? they might eventually be worthwhile contributors to the community.

    Mind you, if they indulge in assholian or inappropriate behavior, they flame/ ignore/ correct/ redirect them; but PLEASE do so based on their behavior, not on the fact that they are Progeny users!
  • I *am* a "mere user" but even though I'm currently running FreeBSD I have great admiration for Debian and affection for the Debian developer community.

    I met up with a bunch of the core folks at Usenix last summer and we went off -- with Ian Murdock leading the way -- for a couple rounds of beer at a local bar in San Diego after they closed down the hotel meeting rooms. GPG keys were swapped, tall tales of PHBs were told, and Ian clued us in to a little of Progeny's future plans, for which the distro is just one building block.

    I like the Debian attitude because it is refreshingly mature, while not been stuffy. That in turn reflects the experience and willingness to try new stuff and see what works, and in turn that goes back to the influence that Ian himself, Bruce and, yes, RMS, have had on Debian. But of course it wouldn't happen without the contributions of hundreds of developers and testers and documentation writers.

    I couldn't be more pleased that Debian has emerged as the flagship of the good old Unix hacker ethic. It made a rather stuffy Usenix meeting come alive for me.

    -------
  • because it uses .deb packages, instead of, say, .rpm packages (eg mandrake)

    --

  • Non-free like KDE? I assume that you mean like Qt, and I thought that that argument had been resolved.

    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • If the company makes a go of it, then it could be a way of getting Debian a lot of support. Just consider what Red Hat has done for Gnome. Or even what Mandrake has done for KDE.


    Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
  • You can find a mirror of the progeny ISO images in australia at:

    http://www.planetmirror.com/pub/progeny/images/r c1 /

    ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/progeny/images/rc 1/

    -jason
  • What IS Debian?

    Some time ago, people on SuSE mailing list seem to have agreed that "running SuSE" means having functioning YAST (SuSE configuration and update tool).

    If I do a minimal Debian install and compile the rest of what I need from the source tarballs, am I still running Debian and eligible for your kindness? Apt and debconf would still work on the set of packages that were installed initially. AFAIK, Progeny uses apt and nothing precludes a user from replacing all Progeny .deb sources with "genuine" Debian ones.

    As it's time for me to upgrade SuSE 6.4, all I want to know about Progeny if their "optional" 2.4 kernel would allow me to do a reiserfs install...
  • Yep, after only 5 posts, wow. Almost record breaking!

    Anybody nice enough to give us an unauthorized copy of the news release?


  • whew ... I caught the announcement on linuxtoday about 20 minutes ago ... I got mine!!!
  • For big projects I think that having it appear on /. is fine. Most of these announcements are for programs that affect linux's future tremendously, so we need a forum to discuss them on. If I want to find out about YAPSTDWAOAD (yet another perl script that does what another one already does), THEN I'll head to freshmeat
  • trivia: apt was originally called deity, a name which was changed to apt after a very intensive flame war...
  • As far as I am qualified to do so I agree with the point you are making but i think the point about the stability of a distribution is about the extra packages and how they interact and are set up.
    As far as I understand it the stability of debian refers to that and not the kernel of the operating system.
  • Have you even tried this distribution? I have and currently use Beta3 at work. It's stable and hasn't given me the dpkg problems that woody gives me at home.

    I found the installer to be a major improvement over what Debian offers currently.

    And what is this bitch about KDE being on the second cd? It's in the distribution so get over yourself. And I'd rate you as flamebait. How about we say "who needs another Red Hat rip-off that pastes KDE in as a default desktop?" It's effectively has the same amount of content as you put in your post.

  • Come back when you're over the development of your first pubic hair and can compose an articulate flame without having to get assistance from your baby sister.
  • Yes i know you can always run testing or unstable, but guess what, that's not stable.

    Huh. And neither is a x.0 version of Red Hat. The common wisdom is you have to wait until version x.2 for everything to settle. So that's half a year to get a new version and another year to get it stable. Debian doesn't look that bad if you ask me.

  • No, I'm pretty sure the whole point of debian is that it's good

    You Like Science?
  • The whole point of Debian is, according to Debian, to be free.

    Which, of course, has nothing to do with whether it's "commercialised" or not, as you would know if you'd read Debian Free Software Guidelines available through the link you provided.
  • Should free software authors start saying "don't ask me about it if you installed it from a Linux distribution; I will only answer questions about it if you installed it from the source

    If they like. Or they can refuse to answer questions under any circumstances, answer all questions with seemingly random quotations that may or not be relevant, answer questions only if they were submitted in Aramaic, etc. It's not like they owe you anything, and if you don't like it then you can always take your questions elsewhere.
  • 09:57:28 (559.67 KB/s) - `progeny-rc1-i386-1.iso' saved [470945792]

    3 cheers for I2!

  • Okay, seeing as how a handful of users and ACs seem to be under the impression Progeny's just a commercial version of Debian who's Bad Evil Closed-Sourcing everything they put out...

    Pay attention! There's been a lot of press about Progeny recently, and most, if not all of it, mentioned how the vast majority (if not all) of their tools are covered under the GPL. Progeny's been friendly to Debian, and the chances of some of the improvements being merged in Debian proper aren't that lousy.

    What's Progeny there for? The same reason Red Hat is [or rather, should be]. If you're a CEO or CFO with absolutely no clue, are you going to let Jimbob install Slackware, where he's the only one who can support it -- or are you going to purchase a solution and support plan from a company that can back it when Jimbob isn't there?

    Just because someone is selling a distribution doesn't make them evil. Get your facts straight before you scream foul.

  • And if you had followed the link in that story, you would have found that woody is not frozen. It was merely a proposal to begin the freeze process [debian.org].

  • Anyone know what the license is of the enhancements? I couldn't see anything directly on the homepage, and 655 MB over a modem is a bit unrealistic :-(

    Could the graphical installer be used in Debian proper, or is it non-free?

  • And guess what, debian's unstable is just as stable as redhat's stable's is unstable.

    --
  • Ever saw a K6 run Win 2k?
    Mine runs Debian.
    Also, mine is free.

    --
  • ...potato is the current stable release, woody is the next one. Before Potato was slink and before that was Bo.

    I'm really late with this (sometimes I take a day away from Internet) but in case someone is reading this:


    release - codename

    1.1 - Buzz
    1.2 - Rex
    1.3 - Bo
    2.0 - Hamm
    2.1 - Slink
    2.2 - Potato
    (2.3 or 3.0) - Woody

    Cheers
  • Wish I had some mod points.


    Mandrake 7.2 and KDE 2 for me? for free?
  • Great, a commercial version of Debian.

    Not the first. Remember Corel?

    The whole point of Debian is that it's not commercialized.

    Er... the whole point is, it's high-quality Free (Libre) software, not that it's not commercialized.

    - - - - -
  • Check Freshmeat and do a search for Debian and ReiserFS. Last I looked there were two projects that had made boot disks to install Debian with Reiser. The older one had you create the volumes manually, while the newer project integrated it in to the install. I used these the last time I did a Reiser install and it worked great. ReiserFS is wonderful.

  • It took me a while to get to their site, so here's a little mirror to the news release and a bit more, but no downloadable iso from me, sorry.

  • That's just a legal cop out. The fact is, that if you use "Debian" in the name, than 99% of users are going to assume that the two distributions are simply different aspects of the same thing. Using Debian in the name, legal or not, still invokes the "Official Debian" distro to sell your software. I'm not saying this is good or bad, its just the consequences of calling it Progeny Debian.
  • When half the entire board, reading high-scores down, is about political issues. Licenses, use of the Debian name, free vs. non-free OSS vs the world. Since I seem the be the only *real* geek here, I have a question. Is there any technological basis at ALL for Progeny Debian, or is it simply a cop-out to project managers who can't stand the idea of using a product from a non-commerical entity?
  • You don't know what your talking about. RedHat is a commerical distribution too, but you can still download it for free.
  • That wasn't my point. My point was that everyone is so caught up with the political aspects (license, etc) that nobody is apying attention to the technology in the distro.
  • Wow! I didn't know Debain was THAT out of date!

    For the uncultured among you, The Social Contract was a book written in the 16th century by the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau.

    PS> This really shouldn't be necessary, but some /. people! I have nothing against Debian. I just thought the naming of the document was funny. No flames, please!
  • There are some big distro's that ship with KDE as default e.g. SuSE (very popular in europe) and Mandrake
    ---
  • but, i have a sneaking feeling that, if you came into #debian, or the mailing lists and asked politely for help. that you would still get flamed for using somthing "watered down", and not as "hardcore" as debian.

    Well, I won't totally disagree with you. I am one of those Debian "helpers". I subscribe to debian-user and reply where I can, and I'm often in irc.openprojects.net's #debian helping people out(my nick is ElectricElf).

    Anyways, I do, on occasion, turn some of the "needier" Progeny/Storm/OtherVariant users away. They're using a commercial distribution, so why don't they pay for their tech support? So far, Progeny hasn't really done a whole lot for the Debian community. They have some more up-to-date packages, but they arn't yet available in the regular Debian archives. They do employ a couple of packagers ... but there are hundreds doing unpaid work, so it's just a drop in the bucket.

    That being said, by and large, I see people helping people. It isn't often that someone who is polite and considerate gets shot out of the water for using a Debian variant.

    On the other hand, Progeny is making money off my giving tech support. I think I'm allowed to say, "No, either give me a cut or I won't help your users." Sure, it sounds cold, and I have very rarely thought that, but it's really quite true. A company selling something should not rely on volounteers to do part of their job for them. Those volounteers will eventually get pissed and angry, for being taken advantage of.

    So you see, it's actually quite complex :)

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  • Well, if Progeny is not Debian, why does it have Debian in its name?

    If you expect that people will be blamed for asking support for Progeny in the Debian lists, let's open them their eyes now and tell them that what they are buying is not what they might think it is?

    Allright, I thought I made it clear, but here it is again:

    Progeny Debian Linux is based on Debian Linux, a distribution put together by volounteers worldwide. Progeny Linux is nearly completely compatible with the normal, non-commercial Debian distribution. However, Progeny is a commercial entity. Debian is not, it's a community effort. On the technical side of things, there's not a whole lot of difference between the two.

    But let's look at Mandrake and Red Hat. The first few Mandrake releases were basically Red Hat clones with KDE added on. Yet the two were considered very different, because both companies had very different goals and very different target audiences.

    My big worry isn't that Progeny is trying to make a buck based on Debian the distribution. My worry is that they'll take advantage of Debian the community. Perhaps by shirking on tech support and reffering people to regular Debian support channels, perhaps by not contributing back to Debian proper's package base. This situation is fraught with difficulty, and I think that the Progeny people should step very lightly. They risk to alienate the Debian community, which would be a bad thing for Debian the community, Debian the distribution, and Progeny the company.


    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  • "at least not yet" being the key phrase here.

    They will eventually. And I actually won't mind for the most part. Just part of the community :) But if I end up catering to arrogant, disrespectful, inconsiderate Progeny users, I will stop. How long will the people that make Debian what it is be able to put up with it, while still holding Progeny in a good light?

    I dunno, and I hope we don't find out.

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  • Agreed. And it's nice that a former DPL points that out :)

    Perhaps I should have been more specific. Instead of "Progeny taking advantage of the Debian community", perhaps I should have said "the Debian community being taken advantage of".

    But, damnit, I've seen it start to happen already. I'd be a maintainer now if I wasn't joining the army. But I am, so I passed. However, I still put a good 5-10 hours a week into helping Debian users, so I feel that I'm allowed to voice my opinion. I see people posting to debian-user and people coming into #debian asking for help. And not politely. In fact, just today, someone repeatedly pasted an error message at me at ten-minute intervals, like I was a bot. Had they been a Progeny user, and the problem had been Progeny-specific, I would have been more than irritated; I would have been mad.

    That's why I'm worried. I mean, Progeny can do everything right, and they can still end up alienating the vast majority of the Debian community. They can't control who their users are, and they can't control how they act.

    Ah well... We'll see :) I'm not one for predicting doomsday, so I'll try and relax, and watch how it pans out :)

    P.S.: To the Progeny developers, especially Branden who is doing great(visible) work: you're doing a good job :) I don't mean to belittle any of you, I'd just like to try to head off what could be a nasty community fight. If I come off differently, I apologize profusely.

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  • I agree that it's a bad idea to ask the Debian organization to support a commercial distribution, and Progeny isn't doing that.

    Nope, they arn't. But that doesn't mean anything if all of a sudden large portions of Debian maintainers' and supporters' efforts go towards maintaining Progeny; regardless of whether Progeny asked for it or not.

    Also, the Debian packagers that Progeny employs are some pretty key ones.

    I realize that much. My original comment wasn't meant to belittle Progeny in the least, and if I could retroactively edit it I would. The purpose was to point out to those who read the Slashdot article and then download Progeny that Progeny is *not* Debian, and that they should maintain a certain attitude when getting support from typical Debian sources.

    One of them mainains X, which is huge and pretty critical.

    Yes, Branden Robinson. Pleasant fellow :) I filed a rather long bug report. Heck, they wern't even bugs, they were just requests for behavioural modifications to the debconf part of XFree86. Very nice guy, and I know it'd be a bitch finding another XFree maintainer if he stopped(let's not bring up Mozilla). And I packaged Mozilla 0.8 myself(took me about two weeks, and finished just before Kitame released his), up to par with Debian Policy. It was absolute hell. While Mozilla doesn't play by regular rules(because of its multi-platform nature, I suppose), and XFree86 would, I realize how much work it'd be.

    Also, note that the Progeny CEO is the Debian founder, and is not one to "take advantage" of the volunteer developers, he is solidly behind the Debian way of doing things and actually created a lot of it. They also have me as chairman for a little while longer (although I have never worked there), and then I'll be on their advisory board, and I am the main author of the DFSG and again not someone to "take advantage" of volunteer developers.

    I'll refer to my first reply on your first comment [slashdot.org]. Even though Progeny may do everything right, Debian volounteers might still feel taken advantage of.

    Thanks

    No, no, thank you ;)

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  • I guess you're right about the tension since the first non-hacker, although I only grudginly admit it ;)

    I think I see where you'er coming from too. I'm not too big on world domination; I do it because I like it. :)

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  • From a technical standpoint(which is what counts in tech support), no, you are not running Debian. Progeny would be, though... But that's not the point here :)

    For people to help you, you need to have a certain attitude. If you go to the debian-user mailing list, or the irc.openprojects.net #debian channel running Red Hat, you better be nice. Not because you're "not cool," but because you're getting help from people who are trying to contribute to the Debian community, and you wouldn't be a part of that.

    The original comment was intended as a warning to Progeny users; if you want support from the Debian community, you need to respect said community. Elsewise, Progeny and the Debian community could have a tense relationship.

    Dave

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  • a) A lot of Debian support people are very knowledgable. It doesn't matter what you're running, they could probably fix it. I've seen lots of Red Hat and other distribution-users asking for help in #debian because we have a reputation for competence.

    b) It does matter where they got it from. Debian packages go through a rigorous testing procedure. As soon as they get the packages from a non-standard Debian source, the quality of the package is questionable.

    c) No, of course we shouldn't say "don't ask me about it, blah, blah, blah." But I help the Debian user base. Why? Because it's what I do for the Debian community. That community puts together a distribution I like, and I repay them by helping to support their users. Now, if I'm supporting Red Hat users, or Slackware users, I'm not really paying back the Debian maintainers, am I? No, of course not. And when I'm helping a Red Hat user, there's a Debian user who isn't gettng help. Simple as that. Now, I don't exclude people based on what distribution they run. BUT, if they run a non-Debian distribution(like Progeny or Red Hat), and they're whiney and disrespectful to boot, you're damned right I won't help. It's not worth the effort.

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  • <I>The only way you can forever avoid the issues that you say you fear Progeny will usher in, is for Linux to remain forever the province of the elitist hacker.</I><BR>
    <BR>
    Please read my comment again, and avoid twisting my words this time.<BR>
    <BR>
    I was not talking about excluding Progeny users from Debian support channels, I was warning Progeny users to be respectful of the Debian community, because they're using a non-Debian-standard distribution. And a commercial one, at that, which has support available from Progeny.

    Dave

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)

  • To be clear, (Score:3)

    by dbarclay10 ( 70443 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @04:36PM (#358594)
    I'd like to make something clear here;

    Progeny is not Debian.

    Okay? :) Just like Mandrake is not Red Hat. Just like Slackware is not the Linux From Scratch HOWTO/distribution. Please keep that in mind. If you join Debian mailing lists, demanding support for Progeny, you won't be pleased with the results. If you go on Debian IRC channels and demand support for Progeny, you'll get flamed.

    If you have a good attitude though, you'll be welcomed. Be nice, be polite. But Progeny is not Debian, so don't expect help from Debian users. Progeny is a variant, and hence rather Debian-like. I'd even say it's compatible on a few levels. But it's not Debian.

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)

  • Re:opportunity (Score:3)

    by Llanfairpwllgwyngyll ( 81289 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @04:03PM (#358595) Journal
    apt - advanced package management tool (or something like that)
    woody and potato are releases of Debian - potato is the current stable release, woody is the next one. Before Potato was slink and before that was Bo. Each Debian release is named after a character from Toy Story :-)

  • Re:A Commercial Version of Debian (Score:3)

    by Llanfairpwllgwyngyll ( 81289 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @04:11PM (#358596) Journal
    This is a commercial distribution *based on* Debian. It's not quite the same thing really.

    Debian is non-commercial; new releases are brought out when they are ready, not just to satisfy the marketing department of a corporation. There is no pressure to remove the *live* bugs database from full public access which might come with being commercial.

    Progeny's Debian-based distribution is someone taking Debian, packaging it up in a certain way, and selling the distro + support.

    Nothing about this worries me - we might even get some commercial software that isn't full of redhatisms that take a while to untangle in order to get it to work on other distributions.
  • You shoud know that Debian Woody froze a couple of weeks ago. It was anounced here on slashdot.

    He's ok now.

    --

  • Re:To be clear, (Score:3)

    by Forrestina ( 120989 ) <spamcatchNO@SPAMtruffula.net> on Friday March 16, 2001 @05:36PM (#358600) Homepage
    "If you join Debian mailing lists, demanding support for Progeny, you won't be pleased with the results. If you go on Debian IRC channels and demand support for Progeny, you'll get flamed."

    if you join ANY irc channel and DEMAND support for somthing, you'll probably get flamed. but, the truth of the matter is, most of the system will be debian. same with storm that i've used in the past. if they're smart and don't totally alter the structure, so that they only add to debian, instead of alter.

    but, i have a sneaking feeling that, if you came into #debian, or the mailing lists and asked politely for help. that you would still get flamed for using somthing "watered down", and not as "hardcore" as debian.

    i'm a debian user, i love it, i recommend it to all my friends. but, the attitudes that you get from a lot of debian users really suck.

    not sure where i was going with all that. but, i think you can expect to actually have a fair amount of help from debian users work just fine. like, howto configure an ethernet card, or how apt works, or similar questions.

    -------

  • >>GNOME bashing
    >KDE bashing
    This flamewar is over. If you wish to continue fighting about GNOME vs. KDE, I suggest you look at Battle of the Desktops [8m.com].
    All your hallucinogen [pineight.com] are belong to us.
  • You are dumb. Ian Murdock MADE THE DISTRO. He's the "ian" in Debian. Get a clue.

  • KDE Discrimination By Assholes (Score:3)

    by Karma Sucks ( 127136 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @05:01PM (#358605)
    They have a Very Very Old KDE on the second CD but they have the latest and greatest GNOME from today! Just look at the timestamps of the files here:

    http://archive.progeny.com/progeny/dists/progeny /m ain/binary-i386/x11/

    It's KDE 2.0 from last year for God's sake they are trying to bias users. :(
  • And not only that they updated their GNOME TODAY. YOU don't think they could at least have the decency to update KDE when it came out WEEKS ago??
  • Surely it should be Progeny Debian GNU/Linux, or would that have made the box too big ;-) ?
  • I appreciate the summary: I tried to hit the fine website, but of course it is currently Slashdotted...

    well, maybe it was problem with an intermediate router. I got the info from a dialup at the time....

    ;-)

    Not a big deal.

  • Great, a commercial version of Debian. The whole point of Debian is that it's not commercialized.

    1Alpha7

  • Re:To be clear, (Score:4)

    by BlowCat ( 216402 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @04:55PM (#358621)
    Well, if Progeny is not Debian, why does it have Debian in its name?

    If you expect that people will be blamed for asking support for Progeny in the Debian lists, let's open them their eyes now and tell them that what they are buying is not what they might think it is?

  • I'm DLing now... (Score:3)

    by B14ckH013Sur4 ( 234255 ) on Friday March 16, 2001 @05:55PM (#358626)
    And was wondering why I should download 2 CDs whose sum is 655MB... they couldn't have packed more on the second or less (5MB) on the first??
    Hmm.

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