Zipspeak maintanence official discontinuation announcement

Tony Baechler tony at baechler.net
Tue May 27 05:57:31 EDT 2008


Nick G wrote:
>     For those who are knew, early in 2005, I installed myself as the Zipspeak maintainer, then still having access to a windows 98 PC at school.  Zipspeak, a linux distribution you could unzip and run on a machine with Windows 98, was a that time languishing, maintainerless.  My hope, at that time, was to keep Zipspeak a viable option for those who need it.  However, I lost access to that PC, which didn't work for testing zipspeak anyway, and any and all others who could've tested for me can no longer do so.  It is no longer viable for me to release Zipspeaks into the wild, or even to support them, seeing as I don't use them.  Zipspeak's functions have been superceded by other distributions, such as GRML, Ubuntu, etc.  Effective immediately, I no longer willl support or maintain Zipspeak.
>   


Hi all,

While I agree with Nick that a live CD is generally much better for new 
Linux users, I understand that not all computers can boot live CDs and 
some may not even have CD drives.  Therefore, if there is enough demand, 
I would take over maintenance.  I still run Win98 here as my primary OS 
although I'm gradually switching to Linux and XP.  The loadlin boot 
loader for DOS is still supported in the latest Debian unstable and the 
"win32-loader" package is designed to install Debian via a Win32 
installer.  I haven't used said installer so I know nothing about it.  
My point is that if I get enough requests for it, I'll continue to work 
on making Zipspeak releases provided there is not a lot of work involved 
in getting the kernel to compile.  I strongly recommend against the 
umsdos file system and in 99% of cases I would say just to use a live CD 
or a multiboot setup, but not all computers can do that.  I'll close 
with a question.  Does anyone even use Zipspeak nowadays?



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