One more dev release for Lycoris. Announcement, bug reporting and ISO download (530 MB). As for another popular Linux distro, the Gentoo 1.4 release is planned for some time in late December 2002.
Lycoris Build 66 Beta Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
> the Gentoo 1.4 release is planned for some time in late December 2002.
I should point out that releasing _anything_ after December 10th is a waste of time, marketing-wise. I see many important open source projects doing the same mistake too (e.g. Gnome). Many times they release final versions on Fridays and weekends, or on days where traffic on the web is extremely low (including Christmas period and other such days).
The best day to release anything and have a press release is Monday to Wednesday, on normal days (no big celebrations or anything). Especially for the Christmas period, releasing between Dec 10 to Jan 5th, is not good business. Sure, you are not “selling” anything, but if you want the word to go out more, to more people, you should stick to dates that make sense to release anything. Just follow Apple and MS release dates for example. In fact, when companies have to release bad news they mostly release it Friday afternoon, so no many people will see it.
that is true, but when you offer something for free, it realy does not matter 😉
> that is true, but when you offer something for free, it realy does not matter
It does matter if you want more people to *learn* or *try* your project. Traffic levels on the web are really low for EVERY site on weekends and Christmas days (including ./). Releasing anything (even non-computer stuff) after Dec 10th, it wouldn’t be as effective as doing so on more normal schedule. For example, ./ linked OSNews twice today and the traffic surge was minimal (as I expected). As for OSNews, it has 40% less traffic on weekends, but all sites (tech or not) are like that actually.
most folks who just give there stuff away don’t care much, especialy if it is a project that gets packaged with a linux distrobution.
An advantage to less traffic is that people can download the ISos easier when not as many people are on
Who needs to market GNOME (or Gentoo)? Marketing is the least of their concerns at the moment, because if are a potential GNOME user, you’ll know about it. You don’t need a press release to tell you, only FreshMeat
This’ll change in the future, when the potential set of GNOME users becomes larger than those who check Freshmeat (or Slashdot or OSNews) everyday, but right now, it’s no concern. Far more important is the fact that releasing at low-peak periods allows mirrors to get the software quickly, and the general fact that OSS developers probably have more free time during the weekends, to do a release.
>You don’t need a press release to tell you, only FreshMeat
The KDE project does do press releases.
And Gnome:
http://www.gnome.org/pressreleases.html
He just said it wasn’t necessary, but I agree with you, Eugenia: press releases are important for marketing, specially if an open source project is huge and wants to be used by many people.
Anybody knows when it will be aviable the final release of Lycoris ?
i would wager within a week. the new 66 beta is pretty sweet, and judginfg from the bug reports it would seem like it’s very, very close.
i have no issues with it, although I have rather dated hardware. it’s quite nice actually…
Ok Ok, so i wonder to know if Lycoris is too slow or its pretty fast compared to RedHat or mandrake?
Does it handle multimedia well?
And its stable?
Sure iam waiting for final release…
Christmas is about charing, community, and gifts. No time is more appropriate for releasing free software than the christmas time…
I think it makes sense to release on a slightly “off” schedule from the point that most people are volunteers and often only have the time to polish things up and support the product on weekends and holidays. This also gives time to fix “show stopping” bugs before everyone tries to download the next week.
I think that marketing Open Source stuff needs to be taken on by more user groups, local shops, and possibly employers?! rather than by the individual developers seperately.
I’ve been using Lycoris for a while now and I think it’s a great distro. It seems faster then Mandrake, however, I’m not sure about RedHat. As for multimedia, I guess that depends. It plays MP3s and movies and you can watch TV on it, if that’s what you meant. Build 46 never crashed on me and so far neither has 66, so I’d say it’s fairly stable. You can always install 66 and use their update wizard to bring your installation up to date when they do release the final Update 3. I would recommend Lycoris to anyone who simply wants a Linux distro that _works_.
Thanks a LOT Json !
soon i will try it !
Hi Jason- Are you the Jason on TuxReports that works for Lycoris?
he’s not the lycoris one…the lycoris jason is Jason Spisak
…he makes sure to do it anonymously. yes, he is a silly person.
joe
I had multiple failures trying to install Build 46 with using two 8Gig scsi drives. Install went fine until it tried to boot using with GRUB. I have downloaded Build 66 and will post a followup with install notes.