Anthony Awtrey: “The only real advantage commercial distributions currently offer over community/franchise distributions is a slightly more conventional vendor relationship and security/ISV certifications. While I admit those are valuable differentiators in certain market segments, their long term value will be eroded by improvements in both Debian and the franchisees making Debian-based distributions.”
Let me add a little observation about Debian as compared to “Debian-based” distros. With the advent of the new kernel policy which leaves to individual distros the task of including most drivers, firmware support, module-type support, etc. starting with the 2.6.11 series of kernels, and notwithstanding the fact that the debian-installer makes installation of Debian a piece of cake, the user base is rapidly moving to Debian-based distros rather than with Debian itself.
Debian has become too fanitically restrictive with things as basically important as hardware support, and even documentation. Debian’s attitude of “let the user get what he wants from non-free” just will not work for the average potential user, because this implies compiling kernels, adding drivers, etc… It is so much easier for a user to simply do a HD install of Knoppix, Morphix, Mepis, Xfld, Ubuntu et al, than to go through the frustration of installing Debian to find out that the only “free” hardware supported is for kerosine-powered Russian war surplus, 35 kilogram laptops.
In other words, Debian is in the process of purifying itself out of existence for the average user. Not for me though, because I know how to compensate for the integrism.
Help! Your RSS feeds are broken (plus I think you may have retired your old rdf feed in the process)! I can’t see your posts on http://ianmurdock.com/?feed=rss2 or atom…
I thought that at first too, but after a bit of experimentation, I noticed that WordPress occasionally returns a 304 (Not Modified) on hits to my RSS feed, presumably because the feed hasn’t been updated since the last hit. (Then again, I’m hitting it repeatedly now, with wget as before, and I’m able to download it repeatedly…)
The old RDF feed should still be available–the new URL is
http://ianmurdock.com/?feed=rdf
I put a redirect in place so the old one should continue to work
http://ianmurdock.com/index.rdf
Let me know if you have any further problems.