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Progeny Debian 1.0 Released
martins99 writes: "Progeny was released today. It is a commercial dist based on debian but with lots of new stuff which Debian 2.2 (potato) or woody (testing) lacks like: support for 2.4, graphical installation, XFree86 4.02, glibc 2.2. Read more at www.progeny.com." Since Stormix is ailing so badly, I hope Progeny can do better...
Had the same problem on my Inspirion (5000 - no E) and that's the reason I'm using storm...finally found a distro that worked the magic foo, only to see them go by-by.
I came to Debian a rank newbie, and was a little
a little apprehnesive because of the install's
reputation.
I read the install documentation a couple of times
crossed my fingers, and took the plunge.
Too my surprize I found a straight forward install
that went very smooth.
I even managed to install KDE with installer
because it asks you if you want to install any
extra software when you are choosing your packages.
True, I didn't just push a button, and go watch
TV, but after doing it, I kept wondering what all
the fuss was about.
blah....nice graphical installer...GRUB included...commercial support...hmmmm...sounds like Mandrake to me.
Want some differences? How about...
These are just a few of the reasons I abandoned Mandrake.
Simple question - no answer on the site: What will a subscription to the Progency Service Network cost?
They are the same, just a filename extension difference
You burn the .raw images just like you would burn a normal .iso image.
.laz
--
My car is orange, my sig is not.
If it just worked, wouldn't it be in the stable branch of the distro?
You can put 3rd-party sources in your apt.sources list if you want to. Only thing is, if the sources there can't be installed in conjunction with a standard Debian installation (due to library conflicts or whatever else)... well, that's the problem of the alternate source, not Debian or apt-get.
I've been using debian for over five years and I have *never* had any serious problems installing on any machine I've ever used.
The installer is extremely flexible. At any point during the installation, you can stop what you're doing and go back to an earlier step of the procedure, or skip ahead to future steps. If what you want to do isn't supported in the menu, the installer can spawn an ash shell and get a command line on the machine even before you've partitioned or formatted a disk. You can handle just about any special case you can imagine by hand at the shell prompt. You could do the entire installation that way if you like! It's true the Debian's installer isn't the prettiest or the easiest, but it's one of the most powerful and flexible there is. You can't get much more flexible than a shell prompt!
These are just a few of the reasons I abandoned Mandrake.
My main reason for dropping Mandrake Cooker in favor of Debian Unstable was that (a) Debian Unstable is a hell of a lot more stable, and (b) has a lot more useful software packaged and easily installable, not to mention (c) upgrades seem to go a LOT more cleanly and smoothly...
Okay, so that's three main reasons... I don't need to know how to count, just how to write a loop to count things for me...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
apt-get install kernel-package /usr/share/doc/kernel-package
cd
zmore README
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Hmm. Yes. When I find a bug or am having a problem with Debian, I submit a bug report or email the package maintainer and usually get a response and sometimes a fix within 24 hours.
With most companies I can't even *find* the email addresses of the appropriate people to email my reports and patches to. I did get a response from a knowledgeable programmer at Sun once, but it sure took a long time.
Yup, Debian lacks commercial support, thank the gods...
--
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
But are the problems you had problems with the actual packages, with the archives themselves, or really with apt-get? I suspect it's more likely that the problems were related to Corel's archive. Perhaps they provided e.g. a version of libc that apt-get interpreted as being "newer". It's not apt-gets fault, it's that Corel didn't intend to make it easy for *Debian* users to get the package, they intended to make it easy for *Corel Linux* users to get the packages.
There are several lists available of unofficial apt sources. apt-get is designed to easily handle many sources, related or not. That doesn't mean it's immune to screwed up archives.
noah
take a look at stunnel (www.stunnel.org)
___
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I love Debian. I use it when I want a linux distro. Its package management (apt-get) rocks. But its installer does suck. I don't know what it is that makes it suck, but it does. I always feel like I am fighting with it. I don't use the installer anymore if I can help it. I made a pretty generic install of base2_2, and the drivers. Upgraded to woody and made a nice tar ball. A few hacks to the boot disks later and I have a bootable cdrom with fdisk, tar, and lilo to make the hard drive bootable. It works great. I can now get past the install quickly and install all those great .debs.
The install really does suck. Sorry.
THANKS! I _still_ like Red Hat better than Debian... especially if I can get few enhancements from VA... ;)
Last time I looked the 2.4 kernels were in woody. In fact, I downloaded one the other day. So if this is the case I would assume all the other necessary programs have been upgraded to the relavent versions.
Not quite true. I just installed a Woody distribution straight from potato disks a few days ago. It was amusing :)
You start with the reiserfs+debian disks (which also include GRUB, and kick lots of ass!), then when you get to the point where you're adding or modifying the sources.list file for apt, you choose to edit it by hand, and replace the "stable" references with "unstable". Hell, add Helix Gnome's debian source entries if you want. Add the sourcecode links too.
When you save and quit, then tell dbootstrap to get to it, it sources and downloads the lists just fine, gets the right task lists from the latest unstable, and even the "simple" option of package selection reflects the new content. It gets the dependencies right, and installs just fine off the 'net right outta the box.
I was impressed, to say the least. :)
Read my stuff.
There's a reason they want you jumping through hoops to get the ISO images. Bandwidth isn't free. You're got two ways to get a Debian CD set -- download the ISO images or use the tools they provide to download the binaries and construct the ISOs yourself. Now which is more likely to succeed -- transferring a 650MB file you hope will make it through in one piece, trusting your transfer agent not to screw it up (and to be able to resume if it can), or downloading a buncha littler pieces (that can be more easily recovered)? apt-get isn't great. It's WONDERFUL. It has quirks like everything else (ever installed a Windows product? :), but it kicks ass.
And we *have* given it some time, the other distros *aren't* doing it. apt-get has been around for coming up *two* years now. dpkg (which understands, but doesn't presume to fix, dependencies and conflicts) has been around even longer. Nothing else has come close.
Read my stuff.
Dude, dissing Slackware as "not-modern" is like putting a big neon sign on your head that says "I'm a newbie!"
Progeny should have set things up so that you can buy the boxed set a month ahead of it being available online, rather than vice versa (with any last-minute security bugs made available online immediately, as with security.debian.org).
This is completely in keeping with the GPL, and would make it more likely that they will collect enough money to pay staff. The free-beer crowd would whine, but without some means of motivating people to pay up, Progeny has even fewer prospects for business success than the fifth dot-com to try to sell you pet food over the net.
Anyone got a mirrors list? None on archive.progeny.com AFAIK...
Where exactly did you find that on their site? The link works but I can't find anything liking to /download/mirrors!
Doh! I agree with you though. I looked at least twice for the mirrors list and nothing... The navigation interface is pretty bad.
Actually, if you upgrade to progeny from potato the version numbers of all the software (or just about all of it I imagine) will be higher, and so changing the apt sources list back to a potato URL would do nothing. All the packages that apt would see available would be lower versions than the ones you have installed. So you'd never have updates. I assume you'd have a lot of trouble going from progeny back to woody too.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
Debian does only have old packages... Have you recently installed a 2.2R2 system? Kernel 2.2.18? XFree 3.3.6. No version of KDE. Trust me, the lack of KDE keeps a lot of potential users using Mandrake. OpenSSH 1.? XMMS 1.01?
You're right, Debian stable has only older stuff. But if you get into your sources.list file and change "stable" to "unstable" and apt-get dist-upgrade, you get all of the goodies you desire (except for pre-compiled 2.4 kernels, but as someone pointed out, I'm going to recompile my kernel anyway -- and kmake-kpkg makes it pretty painless).
As for the stability of "unstable", well, Red Hat's x.0 releases wish they could be this "unstable". Honestly, when testing freezes (hopefully with a 2.4 kernel) I may just switch my sources.list back to "stable" and forget about needing the latest and greatest stuff every day...
(Yeah, right... who am I kidding? *grin*)
Jay (=
Well I am very much a convert to apt-get. There's nothing like thinking of a package you don't have and just apt-get install'ing it. Works very reliably. My main beef is apt-get upgrade asking you every time if you really want to do it - that's just silly and there should at least be a way to configure that feature off.
I briefly used progeny before switching to debian unstable, and I'd recommend it for someone who wants a little handholding. It's a pretty safe way to be close to the bleeding edge. Personally, I like having the 100's of debian maintainers backing me up so I go with the real thing but if you aren't really hard core, Progeny is probably a better idea.
I agree with you about Mandrake - it's really easy to get started with, but doesn't have apt-get. You probably never considered Conectiva, the Brazilian distro but actually I think it's about the smoothest installing and best-configured Linux I've used so far, and it has a version of apt-get modified to use rpm's. Recommended.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I just upgraded to Debian 2.2r2 on my new hard drive last week. I went to Progeny's page but at that time they only had a "release candidate".. oh well.
Installing 2.2 was a lot harder than it was to install 2.1 for some reason. Perhaps it was the fact that my old system was so customized and I had to start over with a default (crippled) setup.
Maybe I'll try upgrading to Progeny but I'm sick of installing stuff. And my 28.8 isn't up to a net upgrade.
apt-get is a great tool which IMHO all distributions should have some form of. Conectiva uses an rpm version of it which is great. The latest Mandrake distribution uses urpmi, which is actually an amazing tool in that it will do almost everything apt-get will. If you haven't had a chance to use it, you should. Give it a package and it will install all the dependencies neccesary and the same for uninstalling packages. The only problem is that it doesn't have a complete rpm depository to choose from like Debian does. Maybe some day....
Upgradeing the kernel usually isnt that much trouble. I'm not sure what went wrong there but It sounds to me like it was a fairly simple lilo problem. If Progeny is like debian the kernel will be put in /boot/vmlinux- and there will be a link /vmlinuz -> /boot/vmlinuz-
/vmlinuz and sometimes cause it not to work correctly. when asked if you want to rerun lilo I always say no and configure lilo my self. Although it should have worked and rebooting shoudl have been fine. My guess would be a bad package.
Lilo will point to
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Has anyone with a SB Live sound card tried it? Does it detect the card?
I read that it's an old KDE which is included and that it isn't even installed by default. I "know" most people here are GNOME people, but there are really many KDE users out there for who, Progeny will then always, sadly, be a secondary option. It is not about how easy it is to apt-get it afterwards, it's about support for your choice of desktop environment. If Progeny supports only GNOME and not KDE (which they obviously do), then they will not get many customers that prefer KDE.
Greetings Joergen
This isn't interesting unless the page actually doesn't work on other browsers. The name they give their "everything but IE" stylesheet is just not that important.
There's fake FUD and there's real FUD. To me this doesn't sound like either, but more of a personal preference. Which is fair.
OTOH, don't denegrate someone just because he is experiencing FUD. Real FUD exists, and is hard to get through.
The problem is so many fakers exist. It's the fakery that's the problem. And generally, though they spread FUD, they aren't even claiming to be experiencing it.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I'm not a Debian user, so I don't know. I've had problems with kernel upgrades removing ppp support (or maybe they just leave it so broken that it won't run... no difference to me). Do apt-get installs have this problem? It can be a bit hard to recover from. (Well, actually, I've always ended up going back to the prior kernel, and usually back to the CD.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
One of the coolest things that can be done with Progeny is upgrade straight to "real" debian, since Progeny is (AFAIK/can tell) completely debian compatible. A simple sources.list edit and a somewhat lengthy apt-get update/upgrade later and bang! regular debian, with the benefit of a really keen graphical installer and a lot of the major packages already installed.
Even so, Progeny itself is quite cool, especially the commercial support aspects. Hopefully they can succeed where (in some sense) Storm Linux failed.
(interesting test of the strength of the apt/dpkg system: switch from progeny to unstable to stable and all the way back and see if stuff still works stably....)
It's there. Along with X 4.x which is incompatable with all but the most expensive newest cards.
That's funny, it works fine with my old Matrox Millennium and the Chips & Technology 65550 in my old Libretto...
Debian Woody (aka testing) does have support for 2.4 kernels, glibc 2.2 and XFree86 4.0.2.
It is correct that none of these are in Potato. However, there are unofficial packages for running 2.4 kernels and XFree86 4 in Potato, both provided by Debian developers.
I'm thinking of moving from Potato to Woody, but I can't find which kernel version Woody uses.
:)
cpeterso
Wow. You must be smart, I bet they didn't know that!
Seriously. They just don't *care*. Or maybe it's that they only test with ie & netscape.. and the netscape one does okay for otehr browsers.
All it says is they called the second stylesheet for non-MS browsers 'nn_global.css'. It doesn't say 'if you don't have netscape, fuck off'
Besides.. I bet they don't care anyway.
Why not? It *IS* debian. It's 100% debian compatable, they just provide some extra packages to do things that are a pain with debian.
Really, it's just a pre-set confiuration of debian.
It's not really an upgrade, just a new set of apt-sources and some neat packages for building a nice coherent desktop.
Why can't the X people be bothered to actually include support for the older cards that they said they would put back into the original source? My S3 Trio64 chip isn't supported and therefore prevents the newly hyped release.
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic --Joseph Stalin
I tried Progeny Beta 3 but unfortunately, ppp didn't work 'out of the box', I guess I just used to being pampered, anyone know if there is a 'dial-up workstation' option during install?
Progeny contained 2.4.2 as of rc1. It should still have that in it... That way you get all of that debian loving, that Woody goodness, and a nifty graphical installer, and last but not least, the 2.4 kernel.
I found it to be immensely simpler than Debian (for newbies, like my dad), but it has some simple gotchas, like the fact that it doesn't ask whether the second CD is available. Other than that little annoyance, Progeny is pretty tight!
Cuchullain
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
I guess I'll buy it for the fact alone that they hired several Debian "Senior" Developers like Branden. Thanks to them, those can now work on Debian-related stuff 24/7.
No way I'm ever working for Progeny. They don't let you sleep, by the sounds of it! Either that or they have more than 24 hours/7 days in the corporate week. And they say Steve Jobs has a "Reality Distortion Field"... this sounds like some wacky Debian-based cult.
Don't drink the Kool-Aid, Branden! For the love of God, don't!
deus does not exist but if he does
I did it. It took a little working to get the dependencies strait. I also had to redo the Ximian Gnome install. I was able to do the whole process without a reboot and without a crash. It is possible to go back and forth between Debian and Progeny, but would I recommend it, probably not.
Along with X 4.x which is incompatable with all but the most expensive newest cards.
Pretty much the only vaguely common cards that XFree 4 doesn't support are the old S3 Trios (not the Trio3D, which is supported). Still, if you do own some ancient crufty thing, the Debian packagers have thoughtfully included modified XFree 3 packages that only support the cards that XFree 4 doesn't.
Note that pretty much every cheap graphics card on the market for the past 5 years is supported by XFree 4. Note also that the new Vesa driver in XFree 4 means that pretty much every graphics card on the planet is supported to some degree, something that wasn't true under XFree 3.
If they want to set an example they should be
given equal weight.
Thereby increasing development costs significantly as they have to rewrite all their Gnome-based config utilities to use QT as well? Progeny made a decision to support one desktop environment over another in order to make life easier for themselves.
Actually, it is targeted for use in networked workstations. It works well as a distro for beginners, but Progeny wants to be able to create clusters of workstations.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
It has an older version of KDE 2.0. It is really targeted to working with Gnome, not KDE. KDE doesn't come installed by default, but you can easily install it using apt-get.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
I have been using Progeny Linux on my Thinkpad since RC2, and I have been very happy with it. I am starting to become a convert to apt-get, even though it does have some very odd little quirks. I think that Progeny needs a little bit of work before it becomes as user friendly as Mandrake 7.2.
Come play Heroes of Might and Magic Mini online.
I don't know what debian you're using (you're probably not), but I run nothing but debian and I have kernel 2.4, glibc 2.2, and X 4.0. All from debian packages (the kernel was source, but compiled using make-kpkg).
It is nice to see a "friendlier" debian-based distro "for the masses" but that doesn't excuse people from the usual "debian is slow" and "debian only has OLD packages" crap.
-nicole
I have no clue why they do that. It's like when they released RC2 and named the installation diskettes *.img instead of .bin. rawrite wouldn't recognize the extension. And nothing in the release notes to explain it either.
A newbie shouldn't feel the need to call Miss Cleo on something like that.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Funny, I find it more interesting that, if you accept the default, Opera 5.0b7 for linux it will identify itself as IE5.0. Considering that isn't preventing me from browsing the web and Progeny's site isn't booting me I don't see what the big deal is.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
The name of the university which I attend is "Carnegie Mellon." Please be sure to follow proper hyphenation and capitalization rules in the future.
You may, if you wish, refer to such orthographical conventions as "hyphecap." This will save some typing in the future.
For more information, click here.
However, why would I want to do that? I'm happy with debian, and actually I no longer have potato, since I'm using woody to get X4.02 and KDE2.1.
Please someone enlighten me.
Signatures are supposed to be funny?
Oh I thought is was here
War is necrophilia.
Sorry, tell that to the folks working on Khtml!
Recently konqueror has gained an option allowing you to use the mozilla engine to render pages, instead of khtml, but anyhow, you are mistaken about konqueror, right about galeon.
Juln
check it out if you got $20,
since it isn't available any other way...
Juln
Being that Stormix doesn't exactly exist as a commerical entity, Progeny effectively replaces it.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Is it just me, or isn't KDE (and GNOME, and Mozilla, and dpkg) a little too slow (think x86 120-200MHz, here)? What happened to "lean, mean GNU/Linux?"
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Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
# apt-get install clue
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies:
clue: Depends: cmucl-clx but it is not installable
E: Sorry, broken packages
--------
Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
Interesting, I'm running sid with a 2.4.2 kernel and XFree 4.02. Still, it will be nice to see improvements in the Debian installer. The Debian installations have always been a bit 'rough'. Once you get it working however, keeping updated with apt-get is a piece of cake (well, mostly). I figure I spend much more time keeping a working system updated, than I do installing one, so I really appreciate apt.
This should make convincing the PHB's that Debian is a viable solution vs. RedHat. Now, we have a vendor to go to for Debian as well. It's not a selling point to me, but the bosses seem to like the fact that a Linux distributions is 'supported'.
I mean if I upgrade to Progeny, and decide to go back to plain old potato can I do that? Or can I go back to testing(woody) from which it was created?
I'd really like to check it out, but I also want safe path back.
What Debian are you using? The one thing Debian provides that makes it better than any other distribution is the quality of its packages.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Mandrake is the one that seems to go to the most effort to be user-friendly, so they would probably benefit from a better installer the most. However, if they're not willing to accept that kind of input from outside the company, Debian would certainly appreciate it.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
It's compatible with Debian. Thus, it supports everything you can get from apt-get - thousands of quality packages.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Corel flopped because they didn't make their software compatible with Debian and didn't provide adequate updates for their own packages. Progeny, on the other hand, seems to be making it completely compatible with Debian.
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
If you find that the instructions are unclear,
The instruction for acquiring the distribution are unclear. Visiting www.debian.org and trying to obtain ISO images makes me go through a bloody great big questionairre which tells me that cause of my broadband connection I should download it.
There's no `fuck off and let me decide for myself' button. What if I want to install on more than one machine? For a distro that uses `its aimed at technial users' as an excuse for being damned unfriendly, this lack of control is surprising.
As for the installation , I like to think I'm experienced enough with Linux to install just about any distro without RTFM. I know how Linux works. Debian requiores me to read the manual it seems (though I really copuldn't be bothered after my last install). Things like E: for error messages, and `base system' aren't immediately obvious. Prolly my fault for not reading the documentation, but usually, I expoect the documentation to be online. No such luck with the Debian installer.
the choices ambiguous, the order illogical,
or something like that,
In my opinion, its buggy. I tried to do a floppy install on 2 machines. I got driver disk one and loaded it when asked. The installer slowly grabbed the fioles of disk. In the next part, the installer told me there were no modules in its install directory, and to go back to the loading modules bit. Okay, I might have a bad floppy disk. But no error messages. That pisses me off significantly.
There's other issues to. There shoudl be a vertical scroll bar indicating the steps for the menu go off the bottom of the screen. THis is basic GUI fundamentals. There isn't one.
I could see the problem. But, the only "problem" you describe is that it's text based.
Most users have no idea that tab and space can be used to navigate a GUI. they also have no idea what modules are and why they shoul;d be loading them.
Apt-get is great, and installing packages with dependency chains in most distros in bad enough that I would simply call it `broken'. But either using the RPM version of APT or some other new tool with fix that within the next six months. Maybe Red Hat will set up a unsupported mirror with a stack pf packages tested against its distro, and use RHN as a download mechanism (allowing paid subscribers to also get closed source apps and perhaps support for these packages).
Yes, installing packages under most distros sucks. But using Debian isn't the answer for those that want to make this easier on themselves, in my opinion anyway. Give it some time and I bet every distro will do this within a year.
It has an older version of KDE 2.0.
Last I heard, they were using KDE 1.2 (one and a half years old) in the last beta.
It is really targeted to working with Gnome, not KDE.
That seems rather pathetic of Progeny. So now users are supposed to pick their apps based on toolkit rather than quality?
I though this type of childish bullshit ended a long time ago, once every modern distro decided to let people choose.
Unless Woody and or Progeny are using Glibc 2.96, I understand this is pretty much impossible.
Ah and to provide commercial support on Debian based system, which is not a bad idea.
Hub
sawfish/gnome
--
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
Is that Progeny isn't missing little bits here & there. Did an apt-get dist-upgrade Potato-->Woody ~2 days ago - debconf slang frontend broken, X configuration broken.... Potato-->Progeny went smooth as silk. Doing an apt-get upgrade to 1.0 at the moment. N.B. a developer in #progeny reccommended adding: /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://archive.progeny.com/progeny updates/newton/
to
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Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
If you find that the instructions are unclear, the choices ambiguous, the order illogical, or something like that, I could see the problem. But, the only "problem" you describe is that it's text based.
Why is that a problem? What is so intimidating about a text interface? It's still got buttons and menus -- it's not like you have to edit configuration files. Does the average new user even know what the difference between text mode and graphics mode is?
I've always thought that this obsession with installers that run in graphics mode has been a red herring.
I am a usability design guy. I look at how people use computers, what kinds of things trips them up, and what kind of stuff they can understand. All the distribution installers (even ximians installer, even though it isn't really a bona fide OS distribution) have serious UI flaws that can confuse newbies and make them (as well as power users) work far less efficiently. Mandrake has serious issues, Redhat's really f*cked up, Suse ist nicht gut, and progeny's a damned joke. If I were to redesign one of the four's installers so that it was the most user-friendly linux installer ever written (which wouldn't get in the way of true power users), which distribution should I award this honor to? Which one deserves it the most?
The Progeny guys don't support the full 3000+ packages available for Debian. (Right now if you were to burn CDs for the latest version of Debian it would take 4 CDs to hold all the packages; Progeny fits on a single CD.) They have put together a working, tested set of packages that make a pretty darn nice installation, and they will keep it up to date. For many people Progeny will provide them with everything they will ever need.
Since Progeny is still Debian, you can easily add packages from the main Debian distribution if you want something that Progeny doesn't provide. And if you ever tire of Progeny or they ever disappear, you can just switch smoothly over to using the main Debian distribution. So there really is no down side to choosing Progeny.
And, by the way, Progeny is donating all their new stuff back to the Debian community. So the improved installer should find its way to Debian. (Probably not for the Woody release, but the one after that should have it.)
For my friends who get interested in Linux, I am burning Progeny CDs and giving them away.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
gnome or kde.
it's on the website.
anyone knows what default desktop/wm progeny is using? i've been trying to find some info about that on their site but couldnt find any.
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
see topic
-- http://electronicintifada.net --
Started downloading the ISOs with 220kb/s, currently half that and dropping. Wonder how fast it'll be in five minutes time when more readers start downloading ;)
-- Einar
http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=debian+reiser
There are 2 projects, both of which provide Debian installer disks with support for Reiserfs. Yes, they're Potato disks, but there are no "woody" disks yet anyway; you'll have to install potato and apt-get dist-upgrade no matter what.
Sotto la panca, la capra crepa
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Woody(testing) does have XFree 4.02, and glibc 2.2. And while there are no kernel-image packages for 2.4, the kernel certainly works just fine (and really, I wouldn't use anything other than a custom-compiled kernel anyway).
That being said, I see Progeny as a definite Good Thing. Personally, I don't have any problems with the Debian installer, but I understand that some people do; different people approach things from different directions(thus explaining the many window managers in the *nix world). From my experience, Debian is much easier to keep up-to-date once it is installed than any RPM-based distribution, and if more people find that it's also easy to install, great.
Sotto la panca, la capra crepa
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
XCDRoast uses .raw files... in fact, it won't see anything else. You could say they provided Progeny as .raw to avoid questions about how to record an ISO file in xcdroast - but then, everyone else in the world will be asking them how to burn a .raw file *shrug*
I wish people would agree to the same extension!
I also wish they'd stick to the same boot procedure (SysV?), but that's a different story.
yup
RedHat 7, w/ all upgrades, 2.4.2, XFree86 4.0.3 and KDE2.1.1 compiled from CVS
works fine on my two linux machines, no problems at all.
For those who want user-friendly slashdot posts, here is a link to Libranet's site: http://www.libranet.com/
Mandrake will have apt in 8.0 too - it's in their beta (or so I heard).
But a simple port to RPM isn't enough. RPM's have to be built to use apt, and very few do - compared to debian unstable which has 6000+ packages that just work.
I don't understand why more sites don't use Yahoo!'s navigation interface design. If only Progeny and User friendly would read some Alertbox...
--
mrBlond
CowboyNeal for president!
"Hit any user to continue."
FYI - I have been using debian 2.2 potato from images followed by upgrade to woody on my 5000e without a problem since day 0.
Have everything the poster listed except for the graphical installer and that is being worked on. Nonetheless good job. This will make commercial support for Debian improve which when trying to sell a client on it is an important. Thing. Also GRUB is nice very nice.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
So what does Kernel 2.2.18 (2.4 option included) really mean? Can we install kernel 2.4 from the distribution?
How compatible is Progeny with using the offical apt-get? Completely?
If you find that the instructions are unclear, the choices ambiguous, the order illogical, or something like that, I could see the problem. But, the only "problem" you describe is that it's text based.
:). And I might be wrong, but the installation procedure of the last version I tried (2.2) looked the same as the first one I tried many years ago (0.9 or so, I think).
I'm sorry, I wasn't clear. The problem is not really being text-based, but the overall organization of packages is a total mess. Slackware was text-based (maybe it's still is, but I don't know as I don't use it), but it's installation was not a nightmare at all.
I agree when people say that once you get used to the Debian installation, it becomes easy (in fact, that interactive configuration of packages is really cool). I just don't have the patience to learn it (I give it a try once in a while, but I always give up at the end
Thanks for the suggestion, but that is not the point.
The point is, it should be easier to update packages, once they are available.
In your case, you had to remove the older version and add the new one. In my case, I tried many options and sticked to a 8.0 beta upgrade (which I must say, worked really fine).
Maybe the worst problem with the rpm package is that it doesn't have a recursively upgrade of dependencies. I tried to upgrade the kde packages (from the cooker), but they required glibc 2.2. Then I tried to upgrade glibc 2.2 too, but about a hundred of packages depended on it, and so on... If apt-get solves this problem, that's a good reason to migrate to a debian-like installation...
I've been using Mandrake for years now and, although it's a good distribution, it's hard to upgrade the big guys (like X 4.0.3 or kde 2.1.1). I recently tried debian 2.2 to try out the famous apt-get, but I think it's text based installation is a pain in the ass (and I'm not even a newbie - I started with slackware many years ago). In my opinion, a distro with an easy installation system and a smooth way to upgrade is the way to go. Will Progeny do it? I hope so...
If it has KDE2 I'm game.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I've nothing against non-GUI installs, but I'm all against routines that are inflexible and brittle - that fail in the (not so) exceptional cases. That, and developers who think the exceptional cases are the user's fault. Difficult to walk into a client's shop to do a new install using Debian, when you know you might end up looking dumb and swearing at the machine if it happens to be hardware for which the Debian install derails; at least with Red Hat you know, despite the trade-off in long-term maintainability, you're going to look efficient as you install it. So I'd say putting a solid installation routine on the front of Debian could just be brilliant.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
I recently found on Va-linux's site there nice little fixed up version of Red Hat 6.2,
Which they are calling
"Red Hat Linux 6.2.4 with VA Linux"
Va-Linux
// what do you mean that was the only copy...
--brian
I guess I'll buy it for the fact alone that they hired several Debian "Senior" Developers like Branden. Thanks to them, those can now work on Debian-related stuff 24/7. And they give back their enhancements to the community.
Well, I didn't say those guys work at Progeny 24/7 of course. But they are free to work on Debian whenever they want. And let's hope that some of them keep an eye on their packages after hours.
c:\windows\command\fdisk /mbr
s /Q 69/0/13.ASP if you're goatse.cx paranoid..
Um, that will erase the master boot record.
See this link for details.
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/article
And here's why. I think Mandrake is THE future desktop distro. If and when they put apt for RPM into the distro, I think they will be the best out there. Making the installer better will give this distro that much easier for new users to move to linux.
:)
Whether I use it or not, it doesn't matter, Mandrake needs to be as easy to get going as possible. Slap apt for RPM on it, and it might be able to go head to head with Debian.
RedHat is simply seen as a server distro. SysAdmin's are dead heads who need something to do while installing the OS.
Suse is actually getting better.
Progeny would be the other distro to consider. But let's wait and see if it catches on. If it does, then progeny would win the award of your talent.
Don't touch Debian, those guys'll reject it in a flash. They like pain- its manly.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
what kind of software support does it have? can't say i've used it much, so im just a little curious.
I think you are wrong. The secret of makeing money with GPL Software is to NOT rely on boxes sale. They rely on support and extra services (like their premier product "Linux NOW", which they will be develop soon). For those widespread use of their system is much more important than sold boxes. And that is why they encourage everyone to get their distribution for free, even if they don't make money with it. It will make them popular and well-known. THAT is the key to be successfull with GPL Software. Use the software as advertising and show the world what you can do. Just look at Linus Thorvalds. He never sold Linux, but he already states that he makes more money with Linux, than with his job. Popularity is the key to success. The funny thing is, that most companys already know that, cause they pay millions for advertising. But they don't understand that a successfull and widely used free software product, is the best possible advertising.
---
"Ein ueberzeugter Mensch ist ein groesserer Feind der Wahrheit als ein Luegner."
"Ein ueberzeugter Mensch ist ein groesserer Feind der Wahrheit als ein Luegner."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Calling it Progeny Debian makes perfect sense given that Ian Murdoch (yes, the Ian who started Debian) is behind Progeny. Also, it clearly identifies the distribution as being Debian-based, as opposed to being yet another Red Hat derivative.
--
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Mandrake also supports the ReiserFS system from the installer. I've been using it ever since. After they got the bugs out of the journaling code, ReiserFS became the most secure filesystem for Linux, since EXT2 tends to brake under havy load due to its asynchronous mode. Running 'sync' every time became tidious.
ultima:~# apt-cache showpkg xfree86-commonb ian_dists_unstable_main_binary-i386_Packages)(/var /lib/dpkg/status)
i an_dists_unstable_main_binary-i386_Packages)(/var/ lib/dpkg/status)
Package: xfree86-common
Versions:
4.0.2-13(/var/lib/apt/lists/http.us.debian.org_de
ultima:~# apt-cache showpkg libc6 | more
Package: libc6
Versions:
2.2.2-4(/var/lib/apt/lists/http.us.debian.org_deb
and kernel 2.4 support
ultima:~# apt-cache search kernel 2.4 | wc -l
54
First, most distros tend to add a little something to the kernel to help the system work better as whole, not unlike the NSA release 2.2 SE. This is especially noticable when some creates a worm that only effects distros using those specifications, usually with Red Hat and its descendants.
Second, thought Woody does use 2.4, it's not the "officially stable" release of 2.4, and those test implementations combined with the test implementations from Debian for the system as whole does cause the overall distribution of Woody to experience problems, and often with the graphical X-drivers.
Err...not that I know...you didn't hear that from me...I'm a Red Hat man...yeah....
So...who's up for volleyball!?
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
The last development before MS bought that cute toy from Spy Glass was the continuous page recognition ability. As a result, bug or not, the scroll bar causes some script information to misplace. No biggie really, unless you'd prefer to believe it's a MS conspiracy to prevent you from contacting people in the world of Linux...
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
You could search slashdot for an article about "journaling file systems." There was an article, I don't think even two months ago, that discussed which distros have provided, recently provided, and will be providing similar file systems like ReiserFS.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Stormix is commercial, and Slackware is Phat. Now, that we have that out of the way, who's up for golf?
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Next time you install any distro that dual-boots to windows, you need to make an adjustment to Scandisk. Under "advance", click "Prompt before fixing errors. Then, when it asks if you want to fix an error the master boot record, click NO! If you don't, you will lose your ability to goto Linux.
Worry not, for someone, somewhere, is finding a way to trick Scandisk into allowing the changes created by LiLo or GRUB.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
I'm sure that's redundant.
Reference: Any Ziff-Davis article that made it to Slashdot.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
This is a common mistake to new linux users, as well as, people doing their first dual-boot with Windows. I've been using Linux since Red Hat 4.0, but when I tried a dual boot on Windows, I got Scandisk-scammed myself twice. That's when I learned the importance of backing up partition tables and making boot disks and recovery disks, even for "toy boxes," if you get my drift.
_ __ ___
I've just run scandisk so I can show exactly what you can expect and recognize the "I hate Linux" warning signs. This will appear as a slightly smaller window (dialogue box) over the main window of scandisk.
ScanDisk Found an Error on Local Disk (C:)____[?] [X]
_______________________________________________
This drive's boot area contains important information that is damaged
or invalid. This can cause Windows to report the drive's free space
incorrectly or slowly. ScanDisk repairs the boot area by recording the
correct values in this area
O Repair this error.
O Ignore this error and continue.
[___OK___] [_CANCEL_]
Click, of course, Ignore, and it'll come up telling you, "Scandisk found errors on this disk, but did not fix all of them," followed by your disks statistics. That is nothing to worry about, because neither LiLo or GRUB are errors;)
Happy computing,
.oO(By Linus, I actually just said that...By Linus, I just said "By Linus!")
Eric
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Progeny is to Debian what Mandrake is to Red Hat. Doesn't make it worse or better, and if you've been updating properly, you should be around 2.4.2 with X 4.2. In my opinion, Debian is the fullfillment of the ideals of the GNU Project, and, quite frankly, pretty darn good one. Furthermore, there ARE several groups developing a graphical install for those who are a little slower on the pick up.
Though, I guess it's hard to answer the question, "What kind of tech support does it have," with, "There are people all around the world with way too much time on their hands willing to help out on USENET and bboards scattered throughout the Linux world."
As I read at an anti-linux site*, PHB's seem to be looking for someone to sue.
*two friends of mine seem to enjoy sending me tidbits from anti-linux sites. that's not as bad as "Microsoft's PenguiNT"...
dricci.com/mspr-pnt1.shtml
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Good luck on the Peanut Installation. I couldn't stop it from deferring to Windows; I mean the double boot worked once or twice, then it bowed to windows as if the mbr were totally ignored; as if it were designed by Gates to discourage potential Linux users. Look, just do a "minimal" Debian installation. Go get it piece by piece from the Debian site. You'll be better off.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
The reason for there being fewer BSD posts in user groups is simple: there are fewer problems with BSD. No problem=no post. Therefore, following your line of "flying-by-your-balls" logic, Mandrake posts are higher au prorata to the number of its confused users. You don't hear any screaming fron the BSD side of Geekdon not because it's dead, but because it isn't in pain like any Linux distro not based on Debian. And as far as Red Hat goes. I'll leave that for the money makers and center-of-the-universe servers of porno sites and used car salesmen with web sites.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
I don't know how to thank you, even though I'm feeling kinda dumb right now. I have been so trained by M$ (like a little doggy) to click YES to something that seems as drastically important as fixing errors (such as not wanting to use Windows), I just did it automacially, like an idiot trying to solve a problem that didn't exist. Thank you again! This has brought to mind hundreds of similar errors on my part. Never again.... Yours truly (stupid), Glanz
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Thanks 2 U 2. I thought I was pretty smart because I've been using BSD for years (no double boot)., but with your post and the scandisk info, I feel I've learned more of the essential than I have by reading every labyrinthically confounding installation file on the web in "How To Land"...
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Although Mandrake seemingly does a helluva job making a desktop RedHat they are also competitors. No one is a competitor to Debian, you can only add to Debian much like you can only add to Gnome, you are taking away users perhaps but that doesn't matter that much for the debian developers. The worst thing that could happen with Progeny is that not enough debian developer gets paid to work on it but thats OK, they didn't get paid before either.
Does Progeny support first time installation on ReiserFS (like SuSE does)?
Is there actually any other distro than SuSE that lets you install on ReiserFS?
keep it simple.
I've been using Progeny since beta 2 on my Dell Inspiron 5000e. Yes you heard right, Dell Insipron 5000e. I tried every distro out there and sent bug reports to every company. There was a problem with X compatability with my Video Chipset. Progeny was the only company that gave a damn to work with me on fixing the bug with their distro. Frankly, I'm disappointed at Red Hat. BTW, thanks ian and branden from progeny for giving a damn to help users. PROGENY KICKS SOME SERIOUS ASS, ESPECIALLY WITH HELIX GNOME!
This is good. I have seen a Progeny install, and it was quite userfriendly: after configuring some basic settings (hostname, root passwd, username to add, etc) the installer started installing away, autodetecting and configuring the video card, sound card, network card and mouse, and about half an hour later a Gnome desktop popped up, ready to go, with browser, word processor and all.
;), but Progeny seems to cover those aspects. In this way, Progeny is good as well: it takes the good things of debian, and adds some user-friendlyness and commercial backing. I most certainly do not see Progeny as a replacement for Debian, but rather a nice addition to it. The more knowledgeable users will probably stick to Debian, because of its power and extreme control and customizability, but for the more average user, this might be very good.
So it is userfriendly. Fair enough. Because it is basically a somewhat stabilized snapshot from Debian Woody (aka testing, which recieves packages from unstable when they're found acceptably bug-free) it has relatively new packages, so that's good as well.
Debian is a great distro, but it can be somewhat harsh on users sometimes, and it doesn't have commercial backing. These two things make end-users and corporations somewhat unwilling to use it (although the wise know better
Finally, I like the way progeny didn't fuck up Debian by altering the way the packaging system works, or by placing proprietary parts in their distro. This way you can use Debian and Progeny interchangeably, and upgrade from one to the other relatively painlessly.
So, let's see it for a userfriendly and beautiful distro with Debian running under the hood!
----
now we may all be a part of the best distobution on the planet!!
no more $$Red Hat$$ or mandrake(which never seems to work the way it is intended to.) or all the so-so distros out there.
I am so excited!!
Thank-you Ian!
-shut up
ok...can some one please kick this trolls ass?
He has got to be from M$ and a moron to because this is the exact same post made about a week ago refering to linux insted of progeny.
-shut up
well...in theory Communism works, unfortunatly when you reach the dictatorship of the proletariot you run into a nasty thing called human nature. I mean how would you expect a person to take complete control over a society to guide it to the true communist dream and when it is reached, just step down and let society go about its merry way?
-shut up
There was support for the Trio64 cards in earlier versions of XFree. Nobody is asking the maintainers to add new hardware. The request is rather that they not break support for existing hardware.
I know it used to work, because back in the day I specifically bought an STB card that had a Trio64 chip on it in order to run X.
doesnt seem there is enough extra to make it worth paying for, but what is these days. =]
the pr0n-o-matic.
the pr0n-o-matic.
http://www.phatmax.net