Eeebuntu 4.0 moves to Debian [LWN.net]

Eeebuntu is an Ubuntu-based distribution for netbooks. Except that it no longer is: the project has announced that Eeebuntu 4.0 will be based on Debian unstable instead. "This is not an attempt at Ubuntu bashing, there are enough people around to take that mantle, this is a strategic development decision to help move our distribution along. Ubuntu is proving more difficult to customise with each release and if Debian Unstable is good enough for Ubuntu then it is certainly good enough for us. I'm sure you would agree."

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Name

Posted Oct 19, 2009 21:49 UTC (Mon) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (13 responses)

Maybe a change of name would be in order to further separate from Ubuntu and make it less misleading at the same time.

Name

Posted Oct 19, 2009 21:56 UTC (Mon) by mmcgrath (guest, #44906) [Link] (10 responses)

Eeeebian is a silly name though :)

Name

Posted Oct 19, 2009 22:06 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

You mean Deeebian.

Name

Posted Oct 19, 2009 22:07 UTC (Mon) by Tjebbe (guest, #34055) [Link] (7 responses)

what about Debeee?

Name

Posted Oct 19, 2009 22:51 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (6 responses)

The ironic thing about Debian is that Debby and Ian have been split up for some years now.

Name

Posted Oct 20, 2009 0:55 UTC (Tue) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (5 responses)

...and that Ian Murdock left the project well over a
decade ago after disagreeing strongly with its move to
democratic (what he'd call hyper-democratic) structures.

Name

Posted Oct 20, 2009 14:10 UTC (Tue) by branden (guest, #7029) [Link] (4 responses)

My recollection (from conversations with him after the fact at Progeny) is
that he mainly got busy with getting his degree. He appointed Bruce
Perens as his successor in early 1996, give or take (about the same time I
became a Debian user myself).

Which isn't to say that he *didn't* disagree with the "hyper-democratic"
evolution of Debian's organization, but those took place after Ian had
mostly faded from view.

Furthermore, that evolution was driven largely in response to Bruce's
leadership style, not Ian Murdock's.

You could always ask him...

Name

Posted Oct 20, 2009 17:52 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, when I took on project leadership, control of all core project packages was with the project leader. I gave them away as quickly to multiple people. Nobody really knew at the time if that would work, but I didn't doubt that it would.

Regarding Debian's decision structure, well, Ubuntu is a reaction to that, isn't it.

Name

Posted Oct 21, 2009 16:23 UTC (Wed) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (2 responses)

Uhh, if you have a few hundred million dollars pocket change and
want to buy adoring masses (so long as they are paid) for your
own vanity distribution you can do it with any of them.
Debian's just the best one to start from. Of course you're trading
short term gain for long-term harm, but when did that ever stop a
capitalist speculator?

Name

Posted Oct 22, 2009 0:12 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Yeah, 'cos Ubuntu, Ubuntu's *harmful*. Paying Debian developers to hack on
a Debian derivative, that's *evil*. It's like murder, only worse.

(sheesh)

Mark Shutleworth's supposed motives

Posted Oct 22, 2009 10:21 UTC (Thu) by philh (subscriber, #14797) [Link]

That version of history would be almost convincing if it were not for the fact that Mark was a Debian Developer _before_ the dot-com boom took off, as you'll note by grabbing this diff prepared by him in 1996:

http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian-1.1/main/so...

As it is, he clearly chose Debian because he liked it enough to work on it anyway, and when he managed (through luck and judgement) to run out of fingers and toes to count his millions, he thought he might know a new way to help out with Debian.

I'm far from being a Shuttleworth fan-boy, I just happen to have been there packaging rsync (among other things) at the time, and can do without people saying that he picked Debian almost at random for nefarious ends when in fact he's been contributing to Debian for almost as long as it's existed.

If I'd managed to make the same sort of money as him, I doubt I'd have managed to do as good a job of injecting new resources into Debian, but I would still have tried, and I'd imagine that some people would hate me for it.

Name

Posted Oct 19, 2009 22:22 UTC (Mon) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link]

Debian EEE/Linux. So that Richard would issue another condemning press release and give the project some extra publicity.

Name

Posted Oct 20, 2009 0:39 UTC (Tue) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link] (1 responses)

With it's small form-factor (and price), it's a device "for the masses". As such, I suggest changing the OS name to "Plebian"!

Excellent name

Posted Oct 20, 2009 6:35 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I'd use that :D

Matches my experience

Posted Oct 19, 2009 21:51 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (7 responses)

I bought a netbook in mid-September and it took me a full month to get a distro that worked. I tried them all and Debian unstable is what I've ended up using.

Matches my experience

Posted Oct 19, 2009 22:56 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (5 responses)

Debian stable + a new kernel works fine on the Acer Aspire One.

Matches my experience

Posted Oct 19, 2009 23:22 UTC (Mon) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (4 responses)

An Acer One 751 is what I bought, and Debian stable installs and runs, but I wanted some newer software versions and when I changed to 'testing' and did a dist-upgrade, my kernel broke because the disk labelling changed from hda to sda in one place but not another :-(

By installing unstable, I get recent software and my disks are labelled "sda" from the start. The X driver for the 751 isn't great, but that's Intel's fault (for not writing a free driver or even releasing specs), not Debian's.

Matches my experience

Posted Oct 20, 2009 6:34 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (3 responses)

What's wrong with testing, why did you skip it? (It normally goes: stable <- testing <- unstable.) It's what I've been using for several years now on the desktop, with great success. According to popcon we are in the majority.

Matches my experience

Posted Oct 20, 2009 8:09 UTC (Tue) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (2 responses)

He did not skip it. He even wrote that he tried it and failed.

Matches my experience

Posted Oct 20, 2009 10:28 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

Installing stable and then switching to testing failed, but if I could have installed testing directly, that would have worked fine. The problem was that I didn't find an image I could put on a usb key for installation.

This was very hard to find for unstable too. Starting from this page:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
you have to get the installer image from the 'netinst' section and an iso image from the 'other images' section. If the kernel versions from the two files match, the installation works, if not it fails. So I downloaded the latest file available in each place every few days, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, success!

There seems to be no coordination between the generating of one file and the other. But the good news which sets Debian apart from the other distros, is that in the end it worked.

Matches my experience

Posted Oct 20, 2009 20:04 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

I've been there, in fact every time I want to install Debian. But after a while I make it, right I don't even know how right now. (Wow.) I think the image boot.img.gz must be broken right now.

Matches my experience

Posted Oct 20, 2009 10:29 UTC (Tue) by copsewood (subscriber, #199) [Link]

I'm using Ubuntu Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire 1 which I bought in May. It installed exectly as per instructions and has worked fine for me ever since. If that didn't work I'd probably try Debian on it (I use Debian on a hosted virtual server), but putting a bootable image onto a USB stick from which you can perform an installation is still slightly fiddly and needs good instructions.

Name change time?

Posted Oct 19, 2009 22:01 UTC (Mon) by sladen (guest, #27402) [Link] (1 responses)

So that'll be Eeebian then!

Beyond the raw trademark implications, this raises some very interesting questions about the pros, cons and complications of derivative naming choices for derivative products...

Name change time?

Posted Oct 20, 2009 6:59 UTC (Tue) by JoeF (guest, #4486) [Link]

The competition Ubuntu-Eee changed their name (for the trademark issues, I think) to Easy Peasy some time back. I don't really like that name, but it sure has no name ties anymore. Tthey've been sloppy with the artwork, though, and are still using mostly Ubuntu artwork.

Eeebuntu 4.0 moves to Debian

Posted Oct 19, 2009 23:02 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

it will be interesting to see what sort of stability they get with this move.
Ubuntu doesn't just take the debian unstable branch and ship it, they do testing and some patches first. with this move eebuntu will have to take on this effort.

Eeebuntu 4.0 moves to Debian

Posted Oct 20, 2009 1:05 UTC (Tue) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link] (1 responses)

So Eeebuntu will be Sidux now ....

Eeebuntu 4.0 moves to Debian

Posted Oct 26, 2009 14:26 UTC (Mon) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

no, seeedux :-)

Eeebuntu 4.0 moves to Debian

Posted Oct 20, 2009 3:16 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I wonder what the difference between Eeebuntu and Debian's own EeePC efforts will be? Perhaps they should just join the DebianEeePC team?

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC