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There is lots of competition on the desktop right now, with:

Mandrake
Lindows
Xandros
Lycoris
Gentoo Games
Debian

And of course Slackware and Suse

Maybe they decided the market was already full. Turning it over the the community makes pretty good sense. Enterprise has always been their primary market.

http://mandrakeuser.cjb.net

New web site up on how to set up mandrake 9.1 to ease the configuration pains of the new linux user. Written and catered for the moderate computer user. It covers how to get and install mandrake and add in most of the needed applications. Covers most of the major software included in the distribution, other freely available applications, newbie command line tutorial, how to handle some common and annoying bugs peculiar to each application.
This HOWTO is my first contribution community, and since I found newbie documentation wanting, I wrote one myself. It is for the impatient user who wants to reduce their startup time, and would apply to other distributions and mandrake versions as well.

Written from a user's point of view, it covers how to get and install Mandrake, add in most of the needed applications, a newbie command line tutorial, and how to handle some peculiar bugs to each application. This guide might spare you a lot of googling for answers as it's all placed on one convenient website.
PART I
1. Introduction
2. Indispensable Tools for the Linux User
3. Useful links

PART II - Mandrake Installation
1. Getting Mandrake 9.1
2. Installing Mandrake 9.1
3. Going through the install sequence
4. Using Mandrake
5. Nice things to add easily
6. Configuration with Mandrake Control Center
7. Configuration with Gnome Control Center
8. Important Configuration of Menus and MIME Types
9. More Advanced Configuration

PART III - Linux Shell and Apps
1. Navigating around terminal
2. Shells -- bash, csh, rsh, sh
3. Environments and Paths
4. File Permissions
5. Editing files
6. Linking
7. Finding Files
8. Using grep
9. Basic bash scripts knowledge
10. Running Remote X applications
11. Mounting Remote File Systems
12. Language setup for man pages
13. Handling Print Jobs

PART IV - Software Packages
1. What are packages?
2. Specifying Sources For Online Downloading - Mandrake Mirrors, Texstar, PLF
3. Packages to be installed from Mandrake CDs - Mesa, mplayer, Timidity, pan, gaim, mozplugger
4. Packages to install from Texstar - Macromedia Flash, nano, Real Player
5. Mplayer and Codecs
6. Other essential packages- Open Office, Sun Java, Adobe Acrobat 5, BitTorrent
7. Setting up SMB share for Windows
8. Using vncserver for remote desktop applications
9. File Sharing - p2p networks - Limewire, edonkey, lmule
10. Running M$ Office under Linux.
11. Games - SNES, MAME, WineX

PART V - Advanced FAQ
1. How do I get DRI 3D acceleration to work?
2. Mandrake Fonts Deuglification and Anti-aliasing
3. Email Clients and Web Browsers (Handling mailto: and http:)
4. Full Mozilla Plugins Configuration (Quicktime, Java, Flash, Mplayer)
5. Konquerer Plugins Configuration
6. X Windows xmatrix screensaver
7. How to adjust the sound volume permanently

Donate money to EFF and other groups which defend our rights. Whats a petition going to tell the industry who already knows 60 million+ people disagree with them from the Napster Saga.

Donate to EFF EFF
Donate to GNU
Donate to Linux Mandrake Linux Mandrake
Donate to Freenet

We should donate to all of these groups because these groups are doing the actual fighting, stupid pettitions arent doing anything. Its like a kid who gets down on the ground banging their fists crying, thats not going to stop the bully from kicking your ass. Not giving the bully the money is also not going to stop the bully from kicking your ass. Hiring people to help you fight the bully will help you kick the bullies ass. Its the only way.

If that was all true, how come previous Linux distros with the intent of making an easy to use Linux not succeed? I think that Mandrake has made quite a respectable, yet easy to use distro, but it still doesn't show up as even a speck of dust on Microsoft's radar. It won't succeed as software alone, we've already seen this. It has to be combined with the hardware, or else people are never going to use it.

Mandrake is no longer just Redhat with pentium optimisations. If you bother to go look at their website
or at the spinoff site mandrakeuser.org (a good start page for many a newbie), you detect all the signs of
something that is more than Redhat.

Cooker is the CVS version that gets devel work. They have several ambitious projects like Lothar,
DrakConf, DiskDrake, and more, all independant of anything really from RH, and in my opinion,
nicer too. The system really has a different feel top to bottom, one that I appreciate more for a desktop system.
I'm not aware of any security level presets in RH, and there are no "preferred ftp access" type areas as per RH
(a way to charge for updates, hello?).

A system can be made into anything you want, distro comparison can only be based upon presets and defaults,
and the harder to quantify "feel" of the set. This is my favorite dist of linux for home and personal use.
It also has a very good response rate on the newbie and expert mailing lists, high Signal-to-Noise ratio.

Bollox. Linux : I boot from the Mandrake 7 CDROM. It flawlessly autodetects my hardware. 1 reboot later I'm at a graphical login prompt. Type in name, password. KDE loads, and I click "connect to internet". Your information is about 2 years out of date. Minimum. You pathetic FUD spreading tosser.

I just checked the ISO image and indeed it only has 2.2.14... interesting

Chris

Also, the poll the Mandrake's web site seems to indicate that they want to differentiate themselves from Red Hat, but maybe I'm reading too much into it.

They annouced that this was coming out on the 5th. The announcment is here.
Debian is better anyway...



Munky_v2

That not the first time an ISO image is available on an FTP (and its mirrors) before the official announcement. Sometimes it is the real thing, sometimes it is not.

I'll wait one or two days for an official announcement on http://www.linuxmandrake.com before downloading it. Safest.

Stéphane

Try linux mandrake. It's basically redhat, but with redhat's broken KDE installation fixed, and defaults more suitable for a desktop than a server. The powerpack editions ships with lots of nice desktop-oriented stuff. Sound is, like redhat, usually a matter of typing sndconfig as root, and letting it autoprobe.