LinuxPlanet - Print - DistributionWatch Review: Progeny Linux beta 2

DistributionWatch Review: Progeny Linux beta 2

By: Michael Hall
Wednesday, January 24, 2001 01:59:54 PM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/previews/2938/1/

Another move into services

For Linux business watchers, the year 2000 will be remembered for the gradual shift from the belief that positioning Linux as a simple shrink-wrapped product set to move off retailer shelves on the strength of a few months of installation support will keep any business afloat for long. While there will be businesses able to build around that as one of a series of products, it's also apparent that the new focus is on providing services and know-how beyond simply getting a Linux desktop machine up and running or maintaining a modest server.

The services model is growing in prominence on several fronts. For example, Eazel has made it abundantly clear that the Nautilus file manager and graphical shell will serve as an easy-to-use conduit allowing them access to the Linux desktop in the form of system and software maintenance and assorted other network services. The latest preview release of the shell, for instance, provides transparent access to Internet-based mass storage.

Similarly, Ximian (nee Helix Code) is moving toward establishing a similar conduit via Red Carpet, its next-generation installation tool, which allows the company to not only ease the introduction of its polished GNOME desktop, but introduces the opportunity for partners to provide software directly to potential customers.

On the enterprise side is Red Hat. Arguments about the viability of the company have centered around the notion that support would be key to its profits, but the unveiling of the Red Hat Network shifts the added value of the distribution away from installation support and toward services. Subscription to the Red Hat Network will ease software and security updates and eventually provide Internet efficiency analysis, assistance in deployments across entire businesses, and security analysis.

With all these examples, the software itself -- be it a complete distribution, a graphical user environment, or a single desktop component -- is more valuable as a stable reference platform or conduit to the end user than a retail product.

Newest to this growing trend is Debian GNU/Linux project founder Ian Murdock's Progeny Linux Systems, which is building a new model for Linux in businesses in the form of Linux NOW (Network of Workstations). The company has just released the second beta of its enhanced Linux distribution. Based on Debian GNU/Linux, the distro isn't an end unto itself: it's a baseline against which services and products requiring more expertise to manage will be leveraged, and Murdock likens it to the work Ximian has done with its GNOME distribution: less of a divergence from the original project than a set of polishing enhancements.

Murdock, who says Progeny's Debian release is not the primary focus of his company notes that he considers the primary value of operating systems to be provision of services:

"There's more future in services," he asserts. "Operating systems aren't where the interesting territory is." According to Murdock, the biggest challenge is in "turning good hardware into a vehicle that allows people to do their work."

At the core of Linux NOW is Pelican, a file system that Murdock hopes will provide the high performance and availability necessary to tie many workstations into a seemingly monolithic whole. Pelican is an attempt to bring together concepts from several other file and operating systems including Sprite, Coda, and Intermezzo.

Through the use of dynamic caching (based on network congestion, server load, or planned disconnection from the network), replication of data, a specialized linking scheme, and even process migration (allowing processes to move from machine to machine as resources are consumed or freed), Progeny hopes to provide the owners of well-established collections of workstations with a network that's as easy to manage as a single machine for system administrators with none of the clumsiness end users often encounter when dealing with shared resources such as printers or disks.

As a foundation for Linux NOW, Progeny takes the well-established Debian GNU/Linux distribution and introduces what Murdock describes as a "good middle ground" between the stable and unstable branches of the project, providing a "commercial grade release cycle." Murdock believes Progeny's work with Debian will allow it to enjoy more mainstream acceptance among users who have traditionally avoided Debian because of the long wait between stable releases and an installation process that isn't as simple as most other major distributions.

Progeny Debian is developed around the testing version of Debian (Woody), but smooths off some of the rough edges that result from working with a bleeding edge development release. Upgrading to Progeny from Debian 2.2, for instance, will net users such improvements as USB support via the 2.2.18 kernel and XFree86 4.0.2. Users installing the distribution for the first time will encounter a GUI installer, an approach to package management that's more "coarse grained" than the existing Debian approach (which requires users to make more specific decisions about the software to be loaded onto their system), and improved hardware detection. Future releases of the enhanced distribution will include work being done on support for hot-plugging USB devices.

Progeny Debian will fit into the Linux NOW strategy by providing tools to ease deployment across numerous workstations, which will be key to ensuring that a uniform set of targets are present upon which the more general networking environment can operate. In a move similar to Red Hat's own introduction of kickstart disks to automate installation, Progeny Debian will feature kickstart installations over networks.

Getting Progeny Debian

Last Friday, Progeny released the second beta of its distribution. This release distinguished itself from the first beta in that it offered the option to download ISO images and execute a standalone install. Previously, Progeny had been available only as an upgrade to an existing Debian 2.2 (Potato) installation.

Users interested in performing a complete installation can download the ISO images from http://archive.progeny.com/images/. In addition to the image for a binaries CD, there are two images for source distribution CD's and a pair of floppy images in case your system can't boot from a CD.

Upgrading to Progeny Debian from an existing Debian 2.2 or a VA Linux "Slink-and-a-Half" system is accomplished by adding the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://archive.progeny.com progeny main contrib non-free

then executing the following commands:

apt-get update
apt-get -f dist-upgrade
apt-get install debconf
apt-get install task-progeny-potato-upgrade

The upgrade will run users through the usual file configuration as well as install a new kernel (2.2.18), which is made available after reboot.

The Progeny Installer: Big Gain for Debian

Debian advocates often find themselves working hardest just to get people to finish an install of the distribution. Though the first stage of the installation, involving hard drive partitioning and setting basic parameters, isn't hard for experienced users, selecting packages during the second stage is a daunting proposition thanks to dselect, the default package selection tool. While dselect includes online help, it's a far cry from the point-n-click package selection most other distributions have moved to.

Debian corrected some of the ease of use issues dselect introduces in its latest release by introducing generalized tasks users could select instead of the package-by-package method dselect requires. Progeny has taken this one step further by narrowing the options even more and wrapping the whole process in a GTK+-based front-end that substantially ups the sense of ease without compromising the feel of Debian's overall installation process, which places a strong premium on requiring users to decide on configuration issues as packages are installed. We've maintained in the past that this is a strength, even if it makes the installation less easy to walk away from, because it also fosters familiarity with critical components before they're given a chance to do harm with a "one size fits all" default setting.

We installed Progeny Debian using a bootable CD. Unlike Debian 2.2, Progeny only briefly rests on a text-based screen (which offers instructions to mount NFS shares or pass parameters to the kernel if the user has hardware with special requirements) before launching a GTK+-based installer app that steps users through the basic steps of partitioning a hard drive. For the most part, the partitioning tool was as easy to use as Red Hat's Disk Druid or Mandrake's DiskDrake, offering "simple" (complete overwrite of the existing partition table and date), "medium," (use of existing free space on the hard drive), and "expert" (user-specified partitioning) levels of control.

We selected the "expert" method in order to preserve our existing partition scheme, which houses another Linux install and a Windows partition. With one extremely minor exception (the installer wouldn't recognize the Windows partition as a valid mount target), the partitioning tool worked very well, though we had to figure out that it wanted us to tap the 'ESC' key to back out of our ill-fated attempt to mount the FAT32 partition.

Once disk partitioning was out the way, the installer placed the base system on the hard drive. As with Debian, it requires a reboot after this step is performed. The installer did a good job of informing us of what it was up to every step of the way during the first phase of the installation.

Once the system rebooted and began the second stage of the installation, we were presented with an X configuration tool which allowed for simple, medium, and expert options. We've had bad luck on our particular hardware configuration with "one size fits all" X configurations that drop our monitor just below its sync range, so we selected the "expert" option, which allowed us to specify the exact horizontal and vertical sync ranges of our monitor. A quick glance at the other choices, though, indicated that the defaults offered were fairly generic options that will work well on common hardware.

From there, the installer followed the same procedure as a standard Debian installation, with the exception being that it provided GTK+-based windows and dialog buttons instead of a plain, text-based display. Most of the options provided 'help' buttons to explain the choices presented, and the date and time setting widget included a graphical calendar.

We noticed a few tweaks toward the end of the setup process we don't recall from Debian's: a checkbox was provided that explicitly activates wheelmouses, and the X configuration tool (which carries the values given to launch the installer forward) also offers the option to set the priority at which X runs, defaulting to -10 (meaning it will take higher priority than most processes on the system for processor time.)

Simple tools were also offered to configure the network, a printer (but without as many features as Red Hat's printtool provides, and the Postfix MTA, which has five configuration levels to suit everything from a simple, standalone system that sends and receives only internally, to a more complex network mail router.

In all, the setup and configuration phase was smooth and simple and we encountered no problems to speak of.

The final stage of the install is where Progeny Debian and standard Debian diverge the most. Where Debian's installer allows the user to select from a list of tasks or the more specific package-by-package installation entailed in dselect, Progeny opts for a much more generalized, "coarse-grained" collection of "package sets". These package sets give users a choice of very broad collections of software plus a few popular packages people might tend to specify. The specific software packages include Apache, Emacs, Xemacs, Netscape, Mozilla, LDAP support, bind, the GIMP, and Samba. In addition, there are some broader package themes available that make it easier to select general categories of software and ensure all dependencies are met.

Once the package sets are selected, a small console window opens that allows the user to monitor the progress of each package as it's installed via Debian's dpkg tool. It's a good positive feedback touch.

Simply relating what the installer does, however, misses a few key elements from the standard Debian installation that have gone missing in action. The process of setting the MBR, for instance, is never mentioned during the install, nor is the user queried for package sources, or which kernel modules they'd like to install by default.

Even though patient users have been answering a few extra questions like this with only the squawks of reviewers wringing their hands over "ease of use" and "attracting new users" to distract them for years, the fact is, their absence will contribute to the perception that Progeny's not as hard to install as its predecessor.

Looking at Progeny

Once the installation is out of the way there's not a lot at this stage in the game to differentiate between the two distributions in terms of how they function from day to day. Once basic configuration tasks are out of the way, the two behave about the same.

Progeny is built, for the most part, on the "testing" (Woody) branch of Debian. The testing branch is a recent introduction to the Debian development process, which previously had "stable" and "development" branches only. Testing represents a slightly less dangerous option for tracking the latest in Debian development without risking the sort of severe breakages that occasionally plague the development/unstable branch. Progeny adds some extra quality assurance into the mix at an accelerated level. Things can still go wrong (and anyone tracking the distribution since the first beta can attest that they have), but there's still a sense that few truly disruptive bugs will make it through the process.

As an upgrade to Potato, Progeny's a nice choice. Among the things it features are the 2.2.18 kernel (sometimes referred to as "2.4 lite" since it incorporated some of 2.4's more anticipated features like USB support), XFree86 4.02 (which puts Progeny a little ahead of even the testing branch of Debian development at the moment), and KDE 2 (which, in all fairness, is available to all but the most corruptly lazy Potato user). Exim has been removed as the default MTA in favor of Postfix, which has a configuration tool so similar to the script provided with Exim that Potato users will have no problem changing between the two. We also caught sight of glibc 2.2 and Mozilla 0.7.

Though it utilizes a non-Ximian release of the GNOME desktop, the distribution has been designed around adding the Ximian repository to sources.list without incurring any errant dependencies.

Progeny also includes a GTK+-based front-end to the package set management system, allowing users to easily add and remove the same broad groupings that were offered during the installation, and there's another GTK+ app that handles configuration of some elements of the distribution in a graphical manner. In addition, printer configuration has been eased quite a bit via both the foomatic database and a port of Red Hat's printtool to work in the Debian environment.

These tools are more likely to be stumbled upon by a user who sticks to the X desktop most of the time, and to that extent, they raise Debian's ease of use among newer users quite a bit. While a "stock" Debian distribution is very configurable, sometimes the tools to perform those tasks are less obvious.

Finally, Progeny does some hardware autodetection and it picked up our NIC and SoundBlaster 128 with no hassles.

Underneath these updates and enhancements, though, Progeny is still largely Debian, and falls closest to the Debian tree of the other Debian-derived distros we've encountered such as Stormix and Corel. We can't think of a better recommendation for it.

Progeny has taken great care to provide a distribution that preserves much of the underlying sense of solidity Debian is known for, but they've added a few incentives to users who may prefer to have some of the latest enhancements to Linux, since Potato was declared stable last year at least, provided in binary packages. We were pleasantly surprised, for instance, to have USB support for a digital camera and Handspring Visor working out of the box, and XFree86 4.02 months ahead of when it will be part of the next stable release is welcome. The 2.4 kernel is also expected to be available as a package option with the official final release, which is slated for later next month.

These enhancements come at a small price: there are a few bugs and glitches, though these didn't manifest themselves very often, and hardly enough to be counted considering the distribution's status as a beta release. The worst thing we encountered during a few days of use of the stand-alone install was a failed dependency for Enlightenment that we corrected by reinserting the Potato archives into our sources.list. Progeny is maintaining an open bug tracking database, though, so any gotchas users may encounter and possible workarounds may well already be documented.

For existing Debian users who don't mind the risk of a few glitches here and there, Progeny's a good choice now, and should prove to be an outstanding choice when it goes gold. For people interested in getting their feet wet with "The Debian Way" who've been put off by the installer, Progeny is also a reasonable call, especially for the more experienced user. For the new Linux user, we believe it will probably be a good choice when it's finished, if only because the relaxed installation and GUI-enhanced configuration tools will leave the neophyte with enough energy to tackle learning the rest of the OS more easily.

The long-term focus of Progeny may be its LinuxNOW product, but that doesn't at all diminish the strengths it brings to the table with its distribution.