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Progeny Releases Linux Platform Manager

Posted by Hemos on from the building-the-interest dept.

IanMurdock writes "Given your previous interest in Progeny, I thought you would be interested in our new Platform Services product direction and the release or our Linux Platform Manager tool. Briefly, Platform Services provides componentized versions of Red Hat and Debian, and Linux Platform Manager allows people to easily assemble these components into custom distributions. You can read more at http://www.progeny.com. More information on our new direction can be found in the Platform Services whitepaper."

14 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Pick A Product by technomancerX · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Ok, could Progeny maybe pick a product, finish it, release it, and market and support it?

    What is this, version 3 or 4 of 'This is what Progeny does'?

    --
    .technomancer
    1. Re:Pick A Product by grub · · Score: 4, Funny


      What is this, version 3 or 4 of 'This is what Progeny does'?

      They're quite adept at putting out white papers! :)

      --
      Trolling is a art,
  2. SlashAds by Dr.+Mojura · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is this important news to all of us, or just a way for Progeny to get some free advertising PR?
    It's hard to keep the bias to a minimum when the story is submitted by the company.

    --
    "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
  3. Shameless Plug by FortKnox · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Slashdot needs a "Shameless Plug" tag to put on articles like this. Look at the submitters address. Slashdot is for news, not PR (unless they are getting paid for this story, in which case, I hope slashdot subscribers don't even get this story displayed to them).

    BTW - What's up with all the Error 500's? Can't the Slashcode guys test the code before pushing it to the 'production' server (btw - these ARE the guys that complain about crashes in windows, then produce slashcode)?

    --
    Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
    1. Re:Shameless Plug by RevAaron · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I agree- I think this product has a good potential to provide some thing fairly important than Linux has been missing.

      At first, I thought that perhaps it shouldn't have been posted to Slashdot, at least not until the product is ready to ship/buy/download/use. But then again, Slashdot posts stories about interesting OSS/FS projects when they're in a larval stage, provided they're interesting. I see this as about the same thing, except it looks like this LPM software already exists to an extent- you just can't get it yet.

      --

      Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
    2. Re:Shameless Plug by arvindn · · Score: 3, Informative
      Slashdot needs a "Shameless Plug" tag to put on articles like this. Look at the submitters address.

      Hey, the submitter is not claiming to be a third party.

      I thought you would be interested in our new Platform Services product direction (emphasis mine)

      Besides, this is Ian Murdock of Debian. Since he's a big name in the free software community, I have no problem with a shameless plug from him. If I guy who's gained a reputation by doing a lot of work uses his status to get some hits and some revenue, well its a nice way of rewarding him.

    3. Re:Shameless Plug by IanMurdock · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually, you can get it. This is a web application you subscribe to, not a product you can download. But it is available today.

  4. Security by Florian+Weimer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They claim to use APT. APT (as used in Debian) does not offer any security (neither package signatures are verified, nor can you use HTTPS for download).

    Does anybody know if Progeny has resolved this problem, or just doesn't care?

    1. Re:Security by Carewolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ????

      Ehmm... That's what signatures are for. You use a signature to detect whether it really comes from Debian.You dont need to encrypt the signature for this to work, all you need is a public/private key-system.

    2. Re:Security by jdaily · · Score: 4, Informative

      Our (Progeny's) implementation of APT is reasonably secure.

      • We have SSL support, derived from a patch by Tomas Pospisek.
      • We have added authentication and authorization.
      • Debian's APT currently supports the signing of repositories.

      Regarding package signatures: that's more relevant to the package installation tools than to APT itself, but long ago, Progeny wrote and contributed to Debian debsigs, a tool for allowing GPG signatures to be embedded in packages.

  5. Deb-Ian by bstadil · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let's cut Ian some slack, after all he is the Ian in Debian

    --
    Help fight continental drift.
  6. It's finally happened... by Dynastar454 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "Given your previous interest in Progeny, I thought you would..."

    It was just a matter of time... Slashdot has finally merged into one collective conscious. Maybe now we can take on Microsoft! :-)

    --


    Laugh at stupidity: mod idiots +1 Funny.
  7. Not stable enough? by Jellybob · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hmmm, anyone else find it kind of ironic that the "Linux Platform Company" shows their software demo being run on IE under Windows XP? /me thinks they need to do a little work on their desktops :P

  8. Re:Is This News Or A Press Release? by IanMurdock · · Score: 3, Informative

    As to whether or not this qualifies as news, our "downs" in late 2001 qualified as news, so I think it's only fair to qualify the "ups" as news too, don't you? The fact of the matter is that we have quietly done quite well for ourselves over the past year and a half. Given all that's gone on around us, I'm rather proud of what we've accomplished, and I'm ready to let the world in on it.

    As to whether or not what we're doing is innovative or cutting edge: Have you looked at what we are doing? What we are doing is nothing short of offering a fundamentally different way of looking at "Linux distributions": as platforms for building precisely tuned solutions as opposed to the one-size-fits-all products that traditional distributions give us. Sounds pretty innovative to me, but I will admit a bit of bias. :-)