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Steven Schafer On The Future of Progeny

Posted by timothy on from the where-we-go-from-here dept.

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."

7 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. That's "Steve Schafer", not "Michael Schafer" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just in case no one caught the discrepancy in the article.

    Jeff Licquia, Progeny Employee

  2. The reasoning behind the decision. by Goronguer · · Score: 5, Informative
    This from the Progeny website (http://www.progeny.com/archive/debian/):

    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.

    I read this to mean that the "standard" Debian distro is sufficiently good that a separate product is not necessary. Rather than being a sign of impending doom for Debian, I see this as a sign of its strength.

    1. Re:The reasoning behind the decision. by steveha · · Score: 4, Informative
      I'd say a significant number of Progeny's features never made it into the debian mainstream.

      Read the article again. Steve Schafer said:

      Many of our Debian improvements have been submitted to the Debian Project and will appear in upcoming releases. Others are being revised to be Debian generic and will be submitted ASAP.

      Patience, dude.

      steveha
      --
      lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  3. Porting the Progeny Installer to Woody by Jagasian · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

    1. Re:Porting the Progeny Installer to Woody by CentrX · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

      An X installer is just silly, as if a higher resolution increases ease of use at all. Including an X installer poses many problems, mainly that it would diverge development on the installer. It would be far better to just have an excellent console installer. Furthermore, including an X installer would dramatically increase the size of the Debian installation system (which currently fits on a few floppy disks), and, again, would have the problem of unsupported hardware. A system administrator shouldn't need to waste time downloading, loading, and then later uninstalling X because it was never needed it to run his web server in the first place.

      --

      "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
    2. Re:Porting the Progeny Installer to Woody by starseeker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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.

      --
      "I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
    3. Re:Porting the Progeny Installer to Woody by mandolin · · Score: 4, Insightful
      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...