The first preview release of Progeny Debian 3.0 Developer Edition is now available for testing.
Progeny Debian 3.0 Preview 1 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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it was the best damn Linux system around.. got me hooked on debian.
The nice thing about Progeny is that it is absolutely Debian Compatible, which means that you can use the pretty Anaconda installer, but you are still running a fully compatible Debian Sarge.
Progeny has a very sound product with great engineering behind it.
I tried Progeny and liked the installer, of course, but the sources.list looked significantly different than “typical” Debian installs. The Gnome desktop looked significantly different than a standard Gnome desktop.
I was concerned that it Progeny had customized things so much that it wouldn’t be compatible if I changed the sources to point to just Sarge, Sid, and Marillat.
So my question is: Was I over-paranoid about compatibility with those repos? Can I safely change the sources.list to my typical “all Debian + Marillat” repos and have things work?
Yeah…
All of the Progeny employees are Debian developers.. Even the Debian project leader works at Progeny, so differences are minimal, but subtle and nice
.
I tried this since I am a big fan of Debian (run it on my servers), and I was thinking this would be a great way to have a linux desktop install that is fully compatible with the regular Debian(unlike Ubuntu).
BUT, Alas I coudn’t get it to work for me… it would hang/crash on hardware device detection phase of the bootup. Apparently there are lots of know problems with this right now judging from their mailing lists.
I will try it later though after a little more work has been done on it.
I could see this distro becoming my new favorite desktop distro once it is released.
From their release notes:
Progeny Debian 3.0 Developer Edition is based on Debian sarge (with some components derived from Debian sid) and includes the following features from Componentized Linux:
* LSB 3.0 compatible runtime with extensions (e.g., CUPS 1.1 printing support, Discover 2.0 hardware detection support, etc.)
* Prototype LSB 3.0 development environment.
* Linux 2.6 with integrated NVIDIA graphics drivers
* Sun Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.4 runtime and SDK
* Mono 1.0 runtime and SDK
* Complete desktop environment including XFree86 4.3 and GNOME 2.8 with integrated support for popular audio, graphics, and video file formats
* Evolution 2.0
* Mozilla 1.7 and Mozilla Firefox 1.0
* Openoffice.org 1.1
* Emacs and VIM editors
* Componentized Linux development tools, including component development and maintenance tools, the Anaconda for Debian installer, and picax for creating Anaconda-based ISO images
I had used the Progeny Beta 2 Componentized for about 6 months before trying Ubuntu. The sources.list was set up differently, but I changed it to look at normal Debian repositories. I loaded a lot of stuff (one reason I had run this and now use Kubuntu is that it is a good modern desktop setup on one disk — I have dialup, so I want a good modern base with minimum download) and I never had a problem.
I may have to check this out again.
hiya.
i too used progeny and then moved to regular debian.
the new debian installer (in my opinion) is just as easy, the only thing is an ethernet connection is good because there’s a lot of programs.
i know it’s probably not the latest set of packages, but for what i use it for it works great – i only have an old computer and still everything works.
peace man,
jim