[plug] Storm Linux 2k and Corel

[Nick Bannon]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2000 at 01:57:44AM +0000, Christian wrote:
[...]
> > Corel actually have their own FTP site which is apt-pointable, but it's full
> > 99% of the time, so currently pretty useless.
> 
> Do you think that any Debian-based distribution will have the
> resources/time/effort to maintain a proper set of archives the way the
> Debian project does?  To me anyway it seems fairly unlikely that they
> would maintain this sort of thing for free... While they could always
[...]

Well, looking at Corel, at least - they're not attempting to copy and keep
up with the entire Debian project, simply a subset of Debian GNU/Linux
i386, of which they've only modified a few chunks ;
http://www.au.debian.org/News/weekly/1999/44/mail#3

"Well, if they haven't changed much, why bother?"

1. I suspect that it's to provide a supportable environment to which they
can point and say "Look - Corel applications (well WordPerfect at least)
work perfectly there".

2. The decisions they've made for ease-of-use and easy default
installations seem to have been very well targeted. Corel Linux has been
fairly widely acclaimed on those points and it's amazing what a little
gloss can do on a solid foundation like Debian. They're not the tradeoffs
the rest of the Debian community is going for - they won't accept such a
"high" minimum spec for machines, or going wholeheartedly into KDE.

That's a good thing. A GUI front end for dselect or dpkg is all well and
good - essential perhaps for a commercial release, and clamoured for
for so long. If that and that alone was what we got, we wouldn't have
the wonder that is APT and now debconf. Now Corel, etc can take _that_
and build on it, while the rest of the Debian project works on.

We'll see how they track the potato release, I guess.

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal