spinynorman Posted December 1, 2006 Report Share Posted December 1, 2006 As of today, the Kanotix distribution is... not dead exactly, but most definitely without a firm direction. Its co-developer has left, its Paypal donation link is down, and it's not clear what's going to happen with it in the future. More at tuxmachines.org. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Artificial Intelligence Posted December 1, 2006 Report Share Posted December 1, 2006 Sad news indeed. :mellow: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted December 1, 2006 Report Share Posted December 1, 2006 I hope they survive. It is/was a great project. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted December 1, 2006 Report Share Posted December 1, 2006 I note with interest that the reasons given are not user related. Well, difficulty upgrading at this time is sort of user related, but the basic issue here is simply philosophical. In proprietary software, issues that end projects are financial. In Open Source, issues are philosophical. Neither of these are necessarily user related. It is always sad to see working teams part company. We hope the best to all and wish them no ill will between friends. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted December 2, 2006 Report Share Posted December 2, 2006 I note with interest that the reasons given are not user related. Well, difficulty upgrading at this time is sort of user related, but the basic issue here is simply philosophical. In proprietary software, issues that end projects are financial. In Open Source, issues are philosophical. Neither of these are necessarily user related. It is always sad to see working teams part company. We hope the best to all and wish them no ill will between friends. Well finance is rearing its ugly head.... although you're correct that philosophy is playing a major part. Kano needs to make money somehow and Kanotix isn't providing it but sucking up his time to make money elsewhere. slh (main kernel developer) absolutely refuses to move to a *buntu base... (as do significant users) both on philosophical and practical reasons... as does slam who takes care of the website etc. Most of the developers either prefer a pure Debian base or nothing..(or at least keeping with a pure distro like slackware but not a "leech" distro which is the term being bandied around IRC {I don't really agree on this term for *buntu but I can see where it comes from}). (from my interpretation) and I don't think kano really wants to move the codebase but its simply an issue of time/resources/money...over-riding philosophy whereas for others with other forms of income its philosophy overriding financial ??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted December 6, 2006 Report Share Posted December 6, 2006 BOOM! I thought Kanotix was pretty nice when i installed it, but seriously, I'm tired of the 500+ distros..... Kanotix deves, please move to Debian if your done, thx.... :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted December 6, 2006 Report Share Posted December 6, 2006 What a pity... one of the finest distros around, and my second favorite liveCD (after Slax). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted December 6, 2006 Report Share Posted December 6, 2006 BOOM! I thought Kanotix was pretty nice when i installed it, but seriously, I'm tired of the 500+ distros..... Kanotix deves, please move to Debian if your done, thx.... :unsure: This is sorta the point and completely not the point at the same time really, Kanotix never stopped being Debian nor ever pretended to be anything else but a taming of unstable/testing with a idiot proof installer which also happened to be an excellent liveCD. So Kanotix was never really a distro as such just a Debian installer on one hand, a working and tirelessly patched Debian unstable... such that you could upgrade across XFree/Xorg or the HAL/Dbus stuff etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted December 6, 2006 Report Share Posted December 6, 2006 Yeah and now the dudes off to make YAD (yet another distro) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted December 6, 2006 Report Share Posted December 6, 2006 Yeah and now the dudes off to make YAD (yet another distro) Actually its not public yet... I don't know what he's going to do (and I could ask) and I honestly don't think he does. Most of the other devs have jumped ship to make YAD on unstable/testing.... quite a few people (me included) are willing to stick with it so long as its not *buntu based. But i don't really call the new unstable/testing CD a 'distro' ... kanotix was never a 'distro' at least to the insiders...IRC was mostly "debian this and Debian that..." (if you see what I mean) basically non of the devs regarded it as a seperate distro to debian... in Mandr* terms it was basically like running cooker with plf... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlc Posted December 7, 2006 Report Share Posted December 7, 2006 Yeah and now the dudes off to make YAD (yet another distro) Actually its not public yet... I don't know what he's going to do (and I could ask) and I honestly don't think he does. Most of the other devs have jumped ship to make YAD on unstable/testing.... quite a few people (me included) are willing to stick with it so long as its not *buntu based. But i don't really call the new unstable/testing CD a 'distro' ... kanotix was never a 'distro' at least to the insiders...IRC was mostly "debian this and Debian that..." (if you see what I mean) basically non of the devs regarded it as a seperate distro to debian... in Mandr* terms it was basically like running cooker with plf... Come on, thats a little far fetched isn't it? Kanotix is a rock-solid Linux based on Debian-Sid, which contains the newest packages and recognizes more modern hardware than any other operating system in use today. Sounds like a distro to me, not saying it wasn't good, I did like it the times I tried, but uh.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted December 7, 2006 Report Share Posted December 7, 2006 Sounds like a distro to me, not saying it wasn't good, I did like it the times I tried, but uh.... I dunno (honestly) ... I don't think its a simple answer or a definitive one because exactly what a distro is is somewhat a philosophical debate.... From my perspective a fundamental part of a distro is its package management. We equate Debian with apt, mandr* with urpmi (and we could split hairs on that one), Gentoo and portage, arch with pacman etc. This indicates some fundamental split for any other YAD.... (I'm not saying its the only criteria) *buntu still uses apt but has its own repo's... and its own deb's... thus it mostly fits that criteria.... like say Corel linux or Linspire... etc. Suse is Suse, a slackware base with RH package management... ?? not sure how that fits into my criteria but Suse is synonymous with YaST ... it makes it a defining thing to associate Suse with (really trying hard here not to mention ....soft.) Now many "distro's" have taken these bases (and others) and called themselves distro's. ... but does that make them distro's? For instance is Kubuntu a distro or a "flavor" of Ubuntu? The existance of distro-watch et-al doesn't help clarify this... because packagers of flavor's of pre-existing distro's are somewhat pigeon-holed into calling it a distro... so kanotix is listed as a distro on distro-watch and others BUT I believe that's largely semantics. Debian inparticular has many flavors.... netinstall, business-card image etc. all have different installers and add different things... kantotix IMHO fits into this slot... its a unstable/testing installer... The forum/IRC etc. is mostly concentrated on fixing bugs in unstable... and kanotix adds fixes and scripts .. and The other thing it adds is some user tools, like ndiswrapper config and stuff missing from Debian. However, and this is really important IMHO... when those tools do reach debian kano withdraws his version.... This might seem minor but IMHO its not.... kanotix is just adding "missing" user tools to Debian and as soon as these are in Debian the Debian tools are used instead... (with the exception of one - the intaller) Sorry, I realise I'm a fanboy but I honestly beleive its these seemingly small things which are important... Judging by the forum (where somehow we have degenerated into Italian to discuss this???) a lot of people feel the same way, the major devs except kano seem to feel the same way and as of last night kano has not announced if he will use a *buntu base or a testing base. Just an example but if you ask for help on stable on the kano forum then noone asks why are you using stable... The devs all seem to feel part of Debian in the larger sense and not want to seperate themselves like *buntu... into a defined seperate distro. The patches etc. are all firmly 100% Debian and part of the same tree(s) so in many ways I think this is the important defining part, not how distro-watch pigeon holes it... Come on, thats a little far fetched isn't it? Its what I believe.... I think kano proposed this BUT the other devs were already having issues about release cycles etc. I could aks him directly, so could you.... but I don't want to and I suspect neither does anyone using the distro... because it is sorta forcing his arm. I don't think I am saying anything out of order to say kano is not known for his interpersonal communications skills, then again neither are many gifted people... so my impression is he floated the idea and the co-dev's had other issues... I understand why he doesn't want to track testing timewise... and I think he's looking for a compromise but not decided. The co-devs all leaving was IMHO a little precipitous.... In the end its what you want to make it yourself .... Kanotix is a rock-solid Linux based on Debian-Sid I take that literally and I take the fact it doesn't say Kanotix is a rock-solid Linux distro based on Debian-Sid as deliberate. I know many of the dev's reasonably well on IRC and my impression is based largely on this... but in the end read my sig :D It really is a matter of definition and opinion and that's very personal but I think if you had been active on #kanotix you might have drawn different conclusions than what has been written by 3rd parties in write-ups. (I mean that if a mag does wa write up or sticks a cover disk then they call it a distro... but IMHO that in itself doesn't make it one) One last thought, most of the official Deb maintainers don't consider it a "distro" apart either... least wise the ones I have had contact with ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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