Steven Schafer On The Future of Progeny

Eugenia writes: "Last month Progeny Linux Systems ceased development on their own distribution in order to focus on selling professional services. In their announcement, the company cited the prohibitive cost of developing and publishing a distro. This move marked another firm in the wave of tech companies, Linux and otherwise, making significant changes to adjust to the market slump. Progeny's distribution was based on Debian GNU/Linux, and many in the Linux community were closely watching the company because it was founded by Debian creator Ian Murdock. OSNews spoke to the President of Progeny Linux Systems, Michael Schafer, once the dust had settled on his company's announcement."

Comments

I'm impressed

[E1ven]

Nice job, Eugenia. That was word for word from an article on this mornings Debian Planet
We don't usually see such blatent plagurism, but hey. it works ;)

1980's all over again

[Anonymous Coward]

early - mid 1980's was massive growth with all sorts of companies trying to dominate the OS and apps. Ultimatly only a few companies won that. Now we are on the next round and watching (or participating) the next replacement OS and apps.
History will always repeat itself.

Why do you even bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

The retreat into "enterprise services" or "contract services" is the first step to insolvency. Whats interesting or insightful about profiling a company that is going out of business????

Re:A shame

[Eugene O'Neil]

Hopefully this isn't just yet another nail in the coffin for Debian...

Progeny is basically admitting that the free version of Debian is getting to be just as good as their proprietary distribution ever was. That might or might not be a bad thing for Progeny, but how could it possibly be a bad thing for Debian?

Porting the Progeny Installer to Woody

[Jagasian]

Will the Progeny OS installer be ported to Woody? One of the most important things to improve in Debian is its installer. User-friendly installers mean more Debian users.

Until then, people will have to get an old Progeny CD, install Progeny 1.0, and change their apt lines, then apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade.

Sure its not difficult to change a text file full of URLs and then type "apt-get update" and "apt-get dist-upgrade" (which would automatically upgrade your entire OS from Progeny to Woody), but then again, I have seen people claim that its difficult to install applications on Linux, which is as easy as typing "apt-get install whateveryouwant".

Re:Porting the Progeny Installer to Woody

[starseeker]

"The Debian installer is easy, as long as you know your hardware. Now, the two things that people most frequently site that supposedly would make it easier to use are hardware autodetection and the usage of an X installer.

Hardware autodetection is great, if you don't mind having it simply not work and freezing a user's system every once in a while. It's not hard to just have a person enter in their hardware."

Yes it is. There are many, many cases where there is no way to figure out the hardware, especially if you are trying to uphold the Linux reputation for bring old boxes back to life. Boards are notorious for not having all the needed information on them, and you may not have the luxury of the original documentation. Under those circumstances, hardware detection may be critical. I know, because I myself have been in this situation.

As for X, that is indeed overkill. I would like to see some small windowing system, like pgui, be adopted for this purpose. A friendly face is worth a lot to new users, and as long as the option is provided for the text install, I don't see what the problem is.

Re:Porting the Progeny Installer to Woody

[mandolin]

Hardware autodetection is great, if you don't mind having it simply not work and freezing a user's system every once in a while.

Which is why autodetection should be an install option, and not mandatory. The hangs you describe mostly happen with legacy ISA devices that don't support probing. Barring sloppy programming, your freezes should occur less and less.

It's not hard to just have a person enter in their hardware.

That's lazy programmer syndrome (I should know, I've got a bad case of it) .. it can be hard for the user. For instance, it's been a couple of years since I got my oem matrox g200 and now it's kindof hard to remember if it came with 4 or 8 megs of ram...