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Progeny Debian Is No More
Nickus writes: "According to this announcement on the Progeny homepage, development of their Progeny Debian has stopped and will no longer be available for sale after 15th of October. They will provide a migration path to the next release of Debian though."
Propz to all dead penis birds
And all logged-in trolls!
i need to quit having a life so i can get some mad FPs!
W()()T!
Just goes to show you can't make money selling Debian!
Corel
Stormix
Progeny
It's been quite evident for a while that interest in Debian is declining, and it won't be around much longer. It's sad to see such a long-time player in the distribution field dwindle, but I guess it had to happen eventually. Good luck to everyone in their future pursuits.
I wonder if they'll go after all the people selling old version copies on eBay?
Progeny Debian is fucking gay (i really need to branch out)
Shame on you!
We should be bombing the terrorists with everything we have, right now!
Not only do we kill the Linux Counter when it is only 7 years old, now we violate Progeny's remains by /.'ing its obituary. What's next? Misspelling the name of a major character from a classic work of fantasy in an online poll?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I downloaded it when slashdot first ran the story on it. They only produced one version of it. I'm surprised they went that quick. It had one of the best installation processes. If you combine that with apt, it makes linux easy to use for anyone. It's a shame they have to go when they had a quality product.
...have to do with some having juicy manmeat in your favorite orifice?
From Godfather II: Vito (De Niro) or Michael (Pacino)?
Windows sucks! Linux is taking over the desktop. This is the beginning of the end for M$.
Oh, wait. Did you say Debian. Never mind then.
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-10 -03-015-20-NW-DB
m.kelley
life is like a freeway, if you don't look you could miss it.
Does this mean that woody is almost done?
The previous post states there are 90,000 fewer Linux users. This post states that Progeny is getting out of the Linux business...
*BSD is dead. It's been burried for quite some time. Linux has caught the same bug, and is now dying itself.
When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
yes, this is a pathetic attempt at role-playing based humor, but damnit, I'm in pain. deal with it.
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
woody's installer still can't do X properly on *any* box I've tried it on. Hopefully the Debian project will incorporate some of Progeny's ideas now that they can't leave it up to the company.
If you finish reading the article, you'll notice that they are simply no longer developing an alternative Debian distribution and will, instead, contribute their changes directly to the official Debian distribution. From the annoncement:
"From a business perspective, our customers consistently ask for Debian, not Progeny Debian, and while Progeny Debian is technically just a "release" of Debian (akin to "potato" or "woody" from the Debian project), the appearance of maintaining a separate or "forked" version is a liability given our company's shift away from a mass-market product and service focus and toward consulting and other professional services.
Progeny will continue to help further the development and adoption of Debian in commercial settings, and we will continue to contribute enhancements to Debian that help Debian become a more viable platform for commercial users. This announcement only affects Progeny Debian the product; it in no way affects Progeny's ongoing commitment to the Debian project or its Debian deployment, custom development, and support services for commercial users."
Time to upgrade to BSD.
While it's sad to see another player leave the field this will make it easier for the others to make a profit. Right now there are too many distros fighting over too few users and we could stand to lose a coupple more.
Having said that, I would still like to see someone else other than just RedHat actually make money at this. (congrats to them but we need some long term competition)
Well, this sucks. I was afraid it was going to happen, but it still sucks. Debian will perservere, though.
For all you id10ts out there they are not closing shop. They are merging with debian proper.
This announcement only affects Progeny Debian the product; it in no way affects Progeny's ongoing commitment to the Debian project or its Debian deployment, custom development, and support services for commercial users.
Get a free ipod.
I am sorry to inform you all that the staff of Linuxgames.com have all died due to exposure to the Anthrax bacterium.
Hi, I'm Doctor Ted Kopell.
Hello, I'm Doctor Dianne Sawyer.
Ted Kopell: Hi, I'm Ted Kopell. I am running from Ossama's men. I have white powder all over me. I must use this bush as a bathroom.
Dianne Sawyer: Hello, I'm Diane Sawyer. I was running away from Ossama's men with Ted Kopell. I have white powder all over me. I must relieve myself.
Some black dude who's name I forgot but he's cool: Hello, I'm the forgetful man. I was running away from Ossama's men. I can't find Ted Kopell and Diane Sawyer. I think they have been captured. I have white powder all over me. Excuse me, I must go to the bathroom on this tree.
...that was the remaining recording found from this news crew. The whereabouts of the three news broadcasters is unknown and we suspect homicide due to malicious bowel movements when they saw "the white powder" on their bodies. Ossama Bin Laden's men were seen in the area, but speculation continues whether it was "the white powder" and not Ossama. Anyone with information should contact the FBI at their new secret number 1-800-JO-PIZZA. Thanks for watching, and I'm Bud Dickman.
... I heard that on Saturday-night's news, on channel 11 FOX. I think Crusader and his fellow co-workers, at Linuxgames.com, have experienced a simillar fate! Someone please give us an update on something, anything! DRI! FreeCraft! Kernel! X11!
AnonymousCowheard: I'm AnonymousCowheard. I will post my story on Slashdot as {Frist!Psot}. I am at my console typeing this in ShitZilla. Some kind of white powder has appeard on my scalp. It isn't dandruff. I must use the restroom...
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
Ian made Progeny to make Debian more simple to install, most of the stuff that sold progeny will be included in Woody so why go with progeny and why split the code. having a comercial side to the Debian project it self is more appealing to me. it will give Debian more market consiousness while not infecting the rest of the project.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I use Progeny Debian on my laptop and have never a *nix work so flawlessly, and able to detect *everything* on my old CTX 700E. I hope someone else keeps up the work they've been doing because, IMHO, Progeny Debian is a great distro.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
It's actually a play on the name of the band "Powerman 5000".
Note that there's a PowerTroll 5000 floating around as well.
Truthfully, this is going to happen again and again in the next few years until the field is dwindled to a few or possibly just one distribution is left. I just hope Mandrake is included. With the state of all things economic there jsut isn't the room for all of these distributions in the financial sense of the word room. Sad thing, but true...just part of capitolism and how it works however.
Derek Greene
Derek Greene
If some good documenters out there could fill in the giant gaps (from explaining what a 'ls' command is in excruciating detail, then completely skipping over to 'make sure the proper startup scripts are there'... wtf? what does that crap mean? That can not possibly be any more ambiguous and useless!)
I personally would like to see an incremental and merged admintool that can keep track (not necessarily all automatic, but that would be nice :) of both packages installed, and non-package installs. This is both to give a unified front of administration assistance for all software (including development) and of course to help facilitate a better organized system due to the horribly long times it takes for any packages to be released of the later (not necessarily latest) software releases. Plus, the interdepency paradoxes have got to be fixed.
Well, this is sounding negative, so I will quit. I do really like Debian and hope it will continue but I think some interface gurus need to be invited to come play.
does this site crash every 10 minutes or something? this has got to be the most unstable site on the entire internet. get some stable servers for god's sake.
Rude as fucking hell. And doesn't make a bit of sense.
saru mo ki kara ochiru
Did anyone say crack??
Click below and start smokin'!
You can migrate to it, then.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
If they're on the way out anyway, and they don't have IP concerns anymore, they should release their installer so somebody else can pick up where they left off. (If they've already done this, mod me into oblivion. I didn't bother to check first as their site was /.'ed)
This space intentionally left blank
It's an email so it's legal to mirror it.
Their site is slashdotted to all heck and back.
more alive than ever! go torvalds!
my friend andrew wants a direct link to teh goatse picture! please provide! PLEASE PROVIDE!
The /. servers are running an open source database that's like 20 years behind in capabilities.
Woody has been frozen for a while now...
Sounds like a personal problem. I'd get it checked out if I were you.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
He said, "Woody".
The most intresting thing coming out of Progeny was Project NOW which earlier this year was cancelled. IMO, this was the killer app linux definately needed to stand head and shoulders above competitors, rather than continuing to compete based on (IMHO rather) trivial benchmark tests. I hope this some how allows Progeny to get back to working on NOW, which is the future for any corporate network OS, Linux, MS or otherwise.
The Progeny distribution, while having a nicer install for Debian wasn't really impressive enough to ever catch on. I suppose some people will miss it but I am pretty sure all involved (Debian Project, Progeny, and end users) will all benefit from decision to end the Progeny distro and have all efforts be put directly into Debian.
With all those distributions dying, and 90 000 users vapored...where's that World Domination plan??
Offtopic? No way!
Flamebait, sure. Troll, definately. Overrated, I guess if you are a coward. But Offtopic?
Time for my favorite game! Pin the crack-hypo on the moderator!
Quality straight pr0n goes here
Well it is ashame, Redhat , SUSE(Europe), Mandrake will most likely be the ones to survive. Do not expect Yellow Dog or any other distro to survive other than those three. Its sad but...if the economy was not in a recession we would not be talking about this...........
When they had their inital showing on /., the press release mentioned how great they were because they were not Unix.
Given they did not understand WHAT they were, I doubted how long they would stay in the marketplace.
Looks like the answer is 'not long'. If they had something worth having WRS will buy it.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Diversity is the engine of evolution; ergo, a sign of a healthy Linux is multiple distributions meeting different needs. Natural selection will weed out the weak, while the survivors will settle into niches both great and small.
Right now, everybody and their dog seems to have a Linux distro... just check out DistroWatch for the states of 36 different distros around the planet.
If Progeny's niche had merit, another distro will come along and fill the void. If it had no merit (and I don't know, not having used it), then its passing allows energy to flow to stronger distros.
Boy, that sounds New-Agey! ;)
All about me
is here just look at the troll to nerd ratio. We have got slashdot on the rope. The reign of nerdy karma whore posters is over! It is the end of every whore.
They put it in pretty plain terms:
... this isn't the "death of Progeny." It's the
* their work has been integrated back into
mainstream Debian
* their customers wanted Debian
* their business focus is shifting towards
consulting and professional services
fruition of their work in a branch of development.
(Branching is different from "forking" in that
the intent is usually to merge/re-integrate
at some later point).
Looks like a before and after picture up there at the top there. See tux with a cell phone, tie and brief case. Then after he is fired laid off and naked he he he he.
continues thorugh this post and others. Yeah linux sucks cause it is open crap cobbled together with no regard to design and just lots of hacking. No wonder debian is dead now along with corel and linuxppc and a bunch of other distos that are lame. Actually all distros are lame its just taking longer for the others to die.
Blanking post is a new and interesting craptacular feature of SLashcode 2.2.
In other words SLashdot sucks!
Debian haber utilizado un nombre mejor para la distribucion.
It seems very unlucky for the "Commercial Debian based distros" going belly up....Is it a curse or something????...Or maybe some serious gypsy curse or something....(your VC) is getting thinner, thinner, thinner...
My apoligies to all non Stephen King fans that did not get that one..
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Microsoft providers a much better and easier solution plus the fact that Microsoft is an established company that is very large. You know that Microsoft is not going to disappear tomorrow unlike and linux distro. All the major linux distos could go away in the next month except maybe Redhat. They might need about a year of decline before ch11.
Catherine of Aragon isn't in Lord of the Rings?
Best Slashdot Co
I will continue here for quite some time. I will go for another 20 minutes if necessary to get this troll power back to where it belongs. Here taco eat a burreto yeah! Ha ha slash sucks bad go windows linux is bleh!
It's not a troll.
I predicted this.
At the time it came out, progeny was great. Not worlds apart from debian.. but it was my preferred install.. (it was the best pick of the latest stuff, basically). I didn't think they would keep it up, or turn a profit though.
Keep flooding in here defending Debain as if it was really good stuff. Hey the install sucks. Dselect? I tried hitting enter to select shit and it didn't work. Slackware is even better than Debian. Hey at least they are up to date and stable. Slack chooses older stable compilers and libs and goes with newer kernels, desktops, apps and X. These are what users of linux really want to be up to date. Who cares what compiler is on there as long as it works. But who wants crusty old versions of X previous to ver 4.
Linux can't get it up and when it does rarely get it up it can't keep it up. Maybe viagra would help the uptime.
... from the article they say they are "merging" with debian proper - of course that's what a company would say. it's all about the wording..
i've tried using progeny for about a little bit, but when i try shifting and symlinking my
it's also got a whole bunch of wrappers used everywhere - in places where it sneaks in a few progeny logos here and there. well you cant blame them - they're were a company afterall.
release 1 was quite a while ago. on the other side of the spectrum, redhat's constantly releasing beta software... what's a company to do? *sigh*
in the first place, people use progeny because they have all heard that the distro's based on debian with great hardware detection. people are attracted to the robustness and
hmmm...corel, storm, and progeny are all gone.. all based on debian
my blog
I am trolling on slashdot completely unfettered. Ahhh the freedom to troll without fear of the dreaded ip banning or some stuff like that.
I've never used Progeny, but I've tried to get Debian on machines of many people who wanted to try Linux for the first time. Installing Potato requires quite of bit of knowledge about the hardware of a particular computer before *starting* to install. It's nice to hear that debian will be getting an easier installation program. Definetly a good thing to show that linux isn't *that* scary :o)
I wasn't able to read the information as it was slashdotted, but I have read a couple people state that they are just killing off Progney Debian so they can focus all their work on the main debian instead of having a seperate branch.
So I was wondering, when will we see this happen, is it already happening? What I really want to know is when woody gets released as ISOs will there be the progeny graphical installation? I love their installation.
I also love Progeny Debian as it was a very very solid clean fealing distro. Only problem is after about 3 days I realized they weren't updating packages whatsoever and if I stuck with Progeny I'd be stuck with old software, so I upgraded it to sid.
What would be great, and debian developers will probably hate this idea, is if they would release ISOs (or a nice way to do a net install) of the current state of unstable with Progeny Debian's install. I would suggest that to anyone who wanted to try out linux because debian unstable is very up to date, and from my usage I've found it to be much more solid feeling than something like Mandrake, which is the distro I've been suggesting to people since it's kept so up to date, but damn it's falky, the package managing program didn't even work correctly for me so it was pretty useless.
Well, think I've wrote enough. Better just remind people what my main question was here since I sorta trailed off. Will we see Debian Woody come out with a nice graphical installation (the one from Progeny)?
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
reality is it is MISinformative, if anything.
Months ago
you, unknown_lamer) This cluebie appears to be basing his "facts"
on that misinformation, certainly not upon woody itself.
MOD PARENT DOWN, NOT UP
Maybe anyone?
I donated money to Mandrake to help offset the fact that I download their distro and burn it to CD. In fact, I plan on doing so again shortly now that 8.1 is out.
Karma... Here's the announcememnt:
Progeny Debian
As of October 1,2001 Progeny has ceased development on its Progeny Debian product; there will be no further releases of the product, and all direct sales of the product will end October 15, 2001. (For a limited time, Progeny Debian will continue to be available for purchase from select distributors. Visit http://www.progeny.com/archive/debian/sales/ for more information.) For recent purchasers of the Progeny Debian boxed product, the 30-day free telephone and 90-day free email support included with the product will remain available until December 31, 2001; for all users of Progeny Debian, a migration path to Debian woody will be provided by the end of October, and support for Progeny Debian will continue to be available from Progeny on a per-incident and contract basis, just as it is today for Debian and other variants (e.g., Corel Linux).
The primary motivation for this decision is our desire for convergence with Debian proper. From a technical perspective, nearly all of the features we introduced in Progeny Debian have found or are finding their way into Debian, and it is thus becoming increasingly unnecessary for us to continue investing the resources required to maintain a separate "Progeny enhanced" version.
From a business perspective, our customers consistently ask for Debian, not Progeny Debian, and while Progeny Debian is technically just a "release" of Debian (akin to "potato" or "woody" from the Debian project), the appearance of maintaining a separate or "forked" version is a liability given our company's shift away from a mass-market product and service focus and toward consulting and other professional services.
Progeny will continue to help further the development and adoption of Debian in commercial settings, and we will continue to contribute enhancements to Debian that help Debian become a more viable platform for commercial users. This announcement only affects Progeny Debian the product; it in no way affects Progeny's ongoing commitment to the Debian project or its Debian deployment, custom development, and support services for commercial users.
For more information about migrating from Progeny Debian to Debian woody, or about support for Debian or Progeny Debian after December 31, 2001, please visit our technical support Web page. For more general questions, please contact Steve Schafer.
Ian Murdock
Chairman
Progeny Linux Systems
Steve Schafer
President and CEO
Progeny Linux Systems
That they should have copied a decent distro.
Everyone knows that debian users are ass pirates who just wanna bash Red Hat.
This announcement has proven the real losers.
What I'm surprised by is all the brains out there in the community haven't come up with a packaging system that marries the ease of use of debian with the flexability and currentness of source.
It really is. I used Debian for years, then Storm came out with what essentially was Debian with a nice pretty and easy installer. Which took the work out of the pain in the a*s of picking packages with dselect with vanilla debian. Besides for that, it still had all the power of Debian. It was a great install, and they died. Then Progeny came along, which was even better then Storm. I haved used progeny on many machines, and have recommended it to many friends. The installation process is just plain smooth, and I think is much easier then Windows to install. The only problem I had with Progeny, is that with my board (Asus A7V266 or A7A266, whatever its called) it takes around 1.5 hours to install, because it sits after the first reboot at "Preconfiguring packages" or something like that for an hour, before it moves on). My friend has the same config as me as far as processor and board, and it does the same thing for him. Besides for that, I loved Progeny. Its a shame to see it go. I hope Debian incorporates the Progeny installer. Thanks for a great product Mr Murdoch.
Jeff Knox
Most of the time, I use Linux 'cause it is Unix. I don't care a whit about open source, Stallman, and other theologians. Most everyone else I know uses something else. They want their computers to make their lives easier, and they want to be able to get work done without. As they'd say, that's what computers are for.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Having used Progeny, and straight Debian, I'd have to say both have features that I liked. Although I had more problems with Progeny though.
Progeny has hardware auto-detect code, which doesn't use the standard modconf/mod-utils/etc for setting up kernel modules. A good idea, but on my laptop I found it would not detect the neomagic soundcard correctly. To me, the design problem was that autodetect would run at boot time rather than install time, where I could correct errors in its autodetection. There were configuration files, but they didn't feel complete enough to correct the errors with.
But to have Progeny's work included into vanilla Debian is A Good Thing(tm). It seems more and more companies are moving towards a service model, away from a product model. Which, although easier means they will be limited by person power instead of product distribution power.
I wish them luck.
-- Huh, what?
Debian is the most open, standard Linux distribution, and by many standards, it is the best Linux distribution. Debian is not owned by a company, but instead it is developed by a wide variety of coders from all over the world.
When the dot-com market croaked, many Linux distributions had to let coders go, and some Linux distributions flat out died. This will never happen to Debian Linux because Debian is a different beast. Debian will always be here. Here to satisfy the practical computer user, and here to satisfy the open source puritan.
Progeny Linux isn't dying. In fact, it is going to a better place: pure Debian Linux... maybe even Woody. I like to think of it that Progeny Linux is going to the "heaven" of open source.
The best of apt-get and BSD Ports, all for Linux:
http://www.gentoo.org/
Oddly enough, while being the most "free" version of Linux, Debian is also closest to the BSD projects in term of development model. Since the Anonymous Coward crowd immediately cast "WRS lays off FreeBSD developers" as "FreeBSD is dying," this obviously means Debian is dying, too.
Or maybe neither really needs an advertising budget anymore? Nah, that couldn't be it.
But it forces you to use Grub if you want a multi-boot system! I would have expected it to at least offer the alternative of a nice reliable and easily configured text-mode LILO.
The trouble with Grub is that it either works or it doesn't. In my case, I have tried using grub 3 times, on 2 different machines, with different distros, and it hasn't worked once. It has either crashed, or left me at a "Grub> " prompt with no idea what to do next.
And so my attempt to switch to Progeny/Debian failed. Is it so difficult to put together a distro that does the grunt-work of detecting and configuring your hardware, and then lets you get on with configuring the rest of your system? Why are so many distros all or nothing?
To majority of the public, RedHat is Linux and Linux is RedHat