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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...
Simple question - no answer on the site: What will a subscription to the Progency Service Network cost?
If it just worked, wouldn't it be in the stable branch of the distro?
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
Being that Stormix doesn't exactly exist as a commerical entity, Progeny effectively replaces it.
-------
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?"
--------
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.
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
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
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.
For those who want user-friendly slashdot posts, here is a link to Libranet's site: http://www.libranet.com/
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?
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
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
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!