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I can't say for sure whether it's the same level of support, but there's always Canonical for Ubuntu and Progeny for Debian support.

I have a number of production servers to this day still running RedHat Linux 7.2. They are patched and up to date, even though RedHat axed support for RedHat long ago. I spend very little time doing so, because Progeny came to the rescue allowing me to milk another couple years out of otherwise perfectly happy, capable, production servers.

Also, there's the Fedora Legacy project which has picked up RedHat 7.3 as well, providing yet another option for administrators of "axed support" distros.

Let me ask you this - what companies or groups have stepped up to the plate to support Win9x after Microsoft's abandoning of the platform?

I guess Windows is really not that open, is it?

• Assemble a 100% Debian common core that addresses the needs of enterprise business users
• Maintain certification of the common core with the Free Standards Group open specification, the Linux Standard Base
• Use the Alliance's combined strength to accelerate the commercial adoption of Debian
• Work with the Debian project to ensure predictable release cycles and features important to commercial adoption

we use debian linux from Progeny in our FileEngine. we paid the LMI for our use of "linux" in one of our service marks: "Driven by Linux - Non-Stop File Power"

why not? i'd pay samba too for the use of their trademark. they provide the foundation of our systems. i don't mind paying...shouldn't they both reap some benefits for their contributions to our success?

Wikipedia is working fine here, including the search function and displaying of entries. Here is Progeny:

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progeny_Linux_Systems
Progeny Linux Systems
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Progeny provides Linux platform technology. Their Platform Services technology supports both Debian and RPM-based distributions for Linux platforms. Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, is the founder, CTO and Chairman of the Board. Progeny makes a distribution of Linux called Progeny Debian. It is an improved version of Debian based on Componentized Linux.

The Progeny homepage is here: http://www.progeny.com/

I know you're not a Comcast customer because you're online instead of suffering with their randomm DNS outages /rant of a fustrated Comcast customer.

Back in 1998, when I got my home DSL line from Pacific Bell (now SBC), it had a fixed IP address, and required no software to install. I still have the same line, same fixed IP address.

I had constant problems with Pac Bell's DNS, and Email relaying was intermittent and usually slow.

So, I got a cheezo (and I mean CHEEZO!) old pentium, Red Hat 6.x, and set up my own Email/DNS/NAT gateway. I worked at it, until I felt familiar with the *nix command line while doing all this. That computer, hardware upgraded a few times, and now running RedHat 7.2 with progeny updates for security patches, runs today, and is routing the packets this post is submitted on.

I was new to Linux. Time went by, and my skillset steadily improved with frequent hits to here, Root Prompt, Linux Today, the local Barnes and Noble for a big, fat book every few months, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

Now, years later, I get paid quite well by several companies to provide these exact services - Email, DNS, etc. as well as various Database and Web-based softwares.

Take your frustrations, and turn them to your advantage. It's a path. Walk it, work to be the best, and it'll pay nicely. Oh, and I never have problems with SBC's DNS or SMTP relays, since I haven't used either since 1998!

Actually if you are looking for a good support option for Debian (or any other distro for that mater) check out Progeny

Progeny of courrse!!\
http://www.progeny.com/

Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition aims to provide an unmatched "out of the box" environment for software developers building applications for the Java, Mono/.NET and LAMP platforms. Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition also serves as a showcase for Componentized Linux and includes all Componentized Linux technologies. As such, it is also an excellent development platform for builders of Componentized Linux based custom distributions.

ISOs

http://archive.progeny.com/progeny/linux/iso-i386/

you may want to read the release notes before downloading; seems aimed at server installs.
not a bad thing, just sayin''
release notes here

Progeny seems like it's a fairly good distro, but for me, I'd rather stick with Ubuntu if I'm going to stray from a pure Debian install.

Progeny's site (btw, a link in the article would have been nice, it's Progeny) calls themselves "the linux platform company" and has a very conservative, professional (in a business sense) look. That's not for me. Ubuntu, on the other hand, is very human oriented. Looking at their site (Ubuntu), the first thing they do is explain the name as, ""Ubuntu" is an ancient African word, meaning "humanity to others". Ubuntu also means "I am what I am because of who we all are". The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world.".

From a pure philosophically aesthetic standpoint, Ubuntu is far more appealing to me than Progeny. Ubuntu is great, it's Debian (like Progeny) and it stays in parity with the most current GNOME releases. Anaconda is one of the last things on my checklist of why I'd switch distros.

That's not to say I dislike Progeny, or that I wouldn't want to run it. In fact, I probably wouldn't have made any of these points had the article not been so aggressive towards Ubuntu.

This isn't like your standard corporate system where you have to root for your competitors to lose. With this diversity, we all win. Good job, and best wishes to the Progeny team. Maybe some day I'll try your distro.

For now, though, it's Ubuntu for me.

Not necessarily relevant, but, I find it interesting that Progeny was founded by the creator of Debian: Ian Murdock.

Their web site: http://www.progeny.com/

I gave them up a few years ago, ever since they decided not provide support for freely downloadable ISO's [...] the fact is, Debian really needs a "grown up" large company to provide commercial support, that will quiet the fears of managers.

And if you get that how will it be different than the current situation created by Red Hat? Red Hat provides freely downloadable ISOs of Fedora Core. Support is provided by a community of volunteers on the mailing-lists and bulletin boards. There is commercial support for the freely downloadable source-code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Almost identically Debian provides freely downloadable ISOs supported by an excellent volunteer community. Commercial support must be purchased.

The only difference I can see is that you claim that Debian doesn't provide the commercial support yet. (And I think that's wrong because Progeny are providing that with their Componentized Platform Services (for both Red Hat AND Debian)

I have no interest in dealing with a company that can make such a profound shift without considering the needs of their existing customers.

It's a profound shift that explicitly did consider the needs of existing customers. Problem is that there were two types of customers: those that wanted a stable, highly-tested, long-product cycle deployment with guaranteed support that they purchased with a contract; and there were those that wanted a free, highly-tested, short-product cycle, rapid feature adoption product. Both those groups are now catered for, with the free one serving as a testbed for the non-free.

Suse looks like its moving in the opposite direction of redhat so that might be an option for a good option down the road.

Explain please.

http://www.progeny.com/

I agree with the previous post.
Now only way to go is to choose supported distro or buy support.
The future is in Debian-based, but corporate-supported distros. It is cheaper for support-provider (than rolling your own) and provides richer experience.

I agree with the previous post.
Now only way to go is to choose supported distro or buy support.
The future is in Debian-based, but corporate-supported distros. It is cheaper for support-provider (than rolling your own) and provides richer experience.

Screenshots please. Is it based on Progeny Anaconda

<a href="http://archive.progeny.com/progeny/linux/iso -i386/20040710/">download</a>

Read these two mailing-list postings from Ian explaining it somewhat more. But really, the Progeny guys have been really bad at actually explaining exactly what "Componentized Linux" is all about. Even though it sounds cool.

Actually, if you scroll down a bit you can find the mirrors here.

If you consider a company as above, namely, that they have bought a Linux vendor's distribution with support and they are not going to modify that distribution and lose their support. At that point, what IS the difference between 'Shared Source' and 'Open Source'?

Well, one difference is that someone else can come along and support the Open Source product if the original vendor chooses not to do so.

Try that with code released under "Shared Source". Equating "Shared Source" with software libre is what it is disingenuous - it isn't the availability of source code that counts, it is what you can do with it.

You are right that this ESR piece is poorly written though. I'm not quite sure how one of his rants qualifies as a "Halloween document".

On our network we still have quite a few old Redhat 7.3 machines. We've been using the Progeny updates for a while now with much success. All of the machines are gradually being moved to Debian, however it'll be a while before the transition is complete and until then Progeny can fill the gap nicely.

Has anybody got thoughts on Progeny transition support?

I think that it may be the easiest way to avoid (or postpone) an upgrade/reinstallation/distro-switch.

All I want is backported security patches.

transition.progeny.com

We'll be using the Progeny Transition Service for a while, on RH9.

But we've already started moving to SUSE Linux, and we'll accelerate that when SUSE 9.1 is released.

Progeny's Componentized Linux will, eventually, allow you to pick-and-choose components from Debian & Fedora as you see fit, and install them with Anaconda. :)

I was surprised to learn that Penguin Computing is still pre-installing Red Hat v9.0 during the same week it reaches it's end of life. It would be nice if they took responsiblity for the security issues and bundled a license to Progeny Transition Service with the workstation. After two weeks, Penguin Computing sales has failed to respond to if they will continue to pre-install RH9 after May 1st.

There is a project to port Anaconda to Debian, but it's not the official installer.

Still, competition with Anaconda might be one of Novell's incentives.

Also, Yellow Dog Linux uses Anaconda.

This comes just a few months after Anaconda, the RedHat installer, started being used for another distro (is it Debian's new installer?). Novell obviously saw this move as a good thing.

Well, I dunno what other OS is using it as it's installer, but it's not debian. Debian's new installer's self rolled, text only, very basic stuff. Anaconda has, however, been ported to install Debian by Progeny. Pretty neat, but I don't see it eever taking precidence to the Debian Installer.

And I do agree with you that it probably won't take away any market share. If anything, it sets up SuSE as running against RedHat, which should be a very interesting battle. And we are the ones to benefit.

Knoppix installed on the hard disk actually behaves like standard Debian, which was somewhat disconcerting - one loses the hardware detection, etc. and colorful boot messages.

So yes, it is actually stock Debian once installed. You could install discover if you want to get hardware auto-detection back, or kudzu, but they were not installed by default last time I checked.

I might be mistaken, I have not used Knoppix to do an install for a few months; been using Fedora Core. Progeny's Componentized Linux project looks interesting though. They provide ISO images of Debian sarge using Red Hat's installer Anaconda so you get LVM+RAID setup.

I mean, choice is a good thing, but, to me, debian is a case study in what can go wrong if the ability to choose every aspect is taken to the extreme. Just shut up and install.

I've recently switched to using debian. I used to always use redhat (ya ya..) but the horrible package management was irritating (to the point I was pretty much doing everything from tarballs), and I heard many good things about apt, so I decided to give it a shot. Installed it on my desktop, and the install was a horrible experience, I have to say. Figuring "hey, I know linux decently well, I'll do stuff myself" I chose "medium" level questions (or whatever is a notch above the default level). Big mistake. It was at the point where I was so annoyed while installing that I was just pressing enter blindly, figuring it would be less work to fix the broken stuff AFTER rather than read through so many pages of info I didn't really care that much about.

I also was equally annoyed at dselect. What a hard to use interface. It's supposed to be the easy way to install packages? The default sorting of "newest packages" at the top is pointless - when I'm installing a new system, there are certain things I want (say, xwindows), I don't even know if they're "new" or not. Also, the apt repository's large size is both it's biggest asset and biggest downfall. On one hand, there's lots and lots of stuff, and I've discovered programs in apt I've never heard of before. On the other hand, it makes dselect a nightmare to lose, because you end up scrolling through 1000 entries with only a vague idea of what you want.

Anyways, all that said, I use debian on what is now the 'main' network server at work (samba, ldap, dns, dhcp, web, mysql, etc..). I also use it as the base for a remote monitoring (SCADA) system at small water treatment facilities (actually, none running debian are online yet, but there will be two by the end of next week). I really love it for both of these applications, but what I ended up doing was just using apt-get on command line to install everything, and let it resolve dependencies. Hm, I need a web server. "apt-get install apache", bang, it installs a whole ton of libraries and such that are needed. That method has worked out very well so far. I actually use my own packages for the software that runs my SCADA systems, but all the libraries are from apt, which makes updating very simple.

The only package I find to be a pain is installing kernel images.. there's a whole manual thing you have to do with editing lilo.conf and setting up initrd.img. Maybe this is just because I installed woody with the 2.4 kernel and then changed to testing? I dunno.

Hm, I haven't read about Anaconda for Debian for a while. I actually might try this out tommorow.. if I remember (and have time to do it), I'll try to post a follow-up..

But that's definately the direction to go. Redhat is very easy to install, but a pain to maintain (install new software) and keep up to date (up2date is ok.. but not as extensive as apt). I don't even have to mention rpm dependency hell (mm.. circular dependencies are fun). Debian is a pain to install, but extremly easy to maintain and keep up to date. Combining the two could be a very good thing..

Go to Mandrake forums and read about all the poeple that have difficulties with getting the installer to work properly. Don't get me wrong; I'm not flaming Mandrake. They have their purpose, but it is a different one than Debian's.

If you have normal stuff (1 year old intel processor, intel chipset, nvidia video card, one 1024x768x24bpp screen, ata133 hard drive) than those automated installs work just fine. But deviate too much from the norm, and things start getting really hairy with Mandrake. The fact is that Debian supports a TON of architectures and a TON of hardware, those automated installs probably won't work properly at all on many of the architectures that Debian supports.

That being said, Debian is probably going to eventually get a nice new graphical installer courtesy of Red Hat.

They do put something like kudzu. It's called discover. (yes, the link is to progeny, but the new debian installer uses it too.) Personally, I think that kudzu is a bit smarter than discover, which hung my Dell Inspiron laptop when probing the PCMCIA controller, whereas when I tried Knoppix kudzu knew what address ranges to skip. But discover worked just fine for my girlfriend's laptop and on the desktop system I just built.

Everything mandrake does is gpl'd, so there's no reason that debian couldn't keep their crazy "hard" installer for traditionalists and setup the mandrake installer to install debian easy-like for newbies. why duplicate effort?

That would require porting the Mandrake installer to all the Debian ports. There are good x86 installers for Debian, from Progeny at least, but it, like Mandrake's, just isn't portable enough to be officially Debian.

The corporate world doesn't seem to have much of a problem with the logo as far as I can tell. HP and IBM were eagerly plastering it over all of their products at the last show I went to. Also, not all Linux companies companies insist on using the Linux pengiun in their logos, take RedHat or Progeny for example.

Btw, is it just me, or does the RedHat guy look like a pretty shady character? I don't think I'd be too inclined to let someone like that manage my servers :p

This article is by Ian Murdock, who is the Ian in Debian. The logo isn't there because of a direct relationship to the subject of the article; the Debian logo is there because of a direct relationship to the author.

Notice that his current project (Progeny) is about companies looking to build on a 'distribution neutral platform', and the link in the article goes to a page about 'Progeny Componentized Linux.' Believe or not Gentoo is not the only highly configurable linux game in town: Progeny seems to be playing that game, but at the enterprise not the consumer level. He's definitely not thinking of Gentoo for this role. He's talking about Progeny.

Debian doesn't detect hardware?

Debian doesn't detect hardware?

Progeny?

I'd gladly pay for patches, but the Enterprise options are why too expensive both for my current workplace and me personally.

I will be switching to Debian, but just not quite yet. Why?

I looked at Debian stable ("Woody") and found it to be too old for me - I need the 2.4 kernel at least for my workstation, and I need the same basic system running on my workstation as my server, so that testing has some validity. For example, the USB support for reading my Zio! CompactFlash reader just isn't there in 2.2. I don't wish to mess around with combining stable and unstable - my systems are running pretty well at this point, and I don't really relish taking a giant step backwards to Woody. Sarge will be a lot closer to what RH 7.x is now.

I had two subscriptions to RHN for 7.3, which I have now switched to Progeny for support.

So: If you're using RH 7.x, try subscribing to Progeny and waiting until Sarge becomes stable before switching, it seems like a safe path to me...

Have you considered buying support from Progeny?

Although the main site was completely unresponsive, and the primary mirrors as well, quite a few of the secondary mirrors were pretty good. The progeny link worked for me.

I am using Red Hat 7.3, and would like to move to Debian. But Debian "stable" (Woody) is just too old for me - I need the 2.4 kernel (for USB capabilities and performance, among many other things). Debian "testing" (Sarge) has 2.4, but it (according to the Debian docs) doesn't receive as high priority for security updates. I don't wish to "roll my own" set of packages from stable/testing, so what to do?

Well, I am assuming that Sarge will be moved to Stable sometime in the next year, so all I have to do now is wait it out with RH 7.3 until that happens - so, I have subscribed to Progeny to tide me over. It seems like the perfect solution, if you already have stable systems using RH and don't want too much of a change too soon. I get the feeling that Sarge will be much closer to 7.x than Woody is, so when Sarge comes out it should be less painful in terms of package versions.

Plus, the Progeny support costs the same as RHN did - $60/year. And you get to give a big message to RedHat by taking your money elsewhere.

Just my 2 cents.

Now would be the time to mention the Transition Service offered by Progeny. They will start offering updates as of May 1, 2004 for RedHat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, and 9.0...

Their service is $5/mo per server. We have 3 RedHat 7.3 servers that are still in testing (just ready to go live) and these systems will be around for a long time to come...I can assure you that we will probably be buying one of these licenses for each of these systems...

What RedHat really needs to do is offer an upgrade path from RedHat Linux/Fedora to one of their server distros...

Now would be the time to mention the Transition Service offered by Progeny. They will start offering updates as of May 1, 2004 for RedHat 7.2, 7.3, 8.0, and 9.0...

Their service is $5/mo per server. We have 3 RedHat 7.3 servers that are still in testing (just ready to go live) and these systems will be around for a long time to come...I can assure you that we will probably be buying one of these licenses for each of these systems...

What RedHat really needs to do is offer an upgrade path from RedHat Linux/Fedora to one of their server distros...

Do people around here have a short term memory or something? Red Hat may be ending their support, but these versions can still get support from somewhere else.

Windows 98 = 8 years of support. I'd rather have 8 years of support for a buggy product than this.

In my experience, Windows 98, even with support from Microsoft, will consume a fair bit of effort just to keep functioning.

My unsupported RedHat 7.2 machines, on the other hand, are pretty much rock solid. The only thing that they really need now is the occasional security update, which you can get from Progency, or from Fedora Legacy, or you can roll your own. Rolling your own RPM isn't too hard, and in a lot of cases you can simply take the SRPM from Red Hat or Fedora and rebuild it for your system. Rolling your own updates for Windows isn't really an option, and Windows 98 would be such an unstable basis that I'd consider it a waste of effort.

why does RedHat have to be all corporate and crap now?

Because they're a corporation, stupid! They are in business to make money, not to please the opensource community.

Oh, wait... the only reason they're where they are is because of the opensource community, right? ... how ironic!

Bah - who needs' em?

Hope that Progeny offers their patching service and support for Enterprise Linux as well as RH 7 and 8.