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There is also MandrakeSoft's Multi Network Firewall which is a very nice firewall + network infrastructure management software that provides many features, including a multi-VPN support. And it's very easy to use.

I pasted the URL on the subject line because I don't expect to be modded up. The URL points to the second most popoular DVD burning backend on Linux, dvd+rw-tools. Most uninformed Linux users will point to dvdrecord, which is basically just a patch applied to the opensource version of cdrecord (cdrecord-proDVD is a binary-only release). It's also availabe here, as a pure patch. The author of cdrecord, Joerg Schilling, is well-known for his dislike of dvdrecord, which he considers "illegal" as it purportedly violates certain provisions of the GPL. Andy Polyakov's dvd+rw-tools, on the other hand, is a totally independent implementation, at least as far as the burn strategy is concerned. For the creation of the burn data, it uses mkisofs as a backend. Despite the name, dvd+rw-tools can also burn -R/W!

My big point is with IBM, they still can't even port Lotus Notes to linux.

IBM didn't have to. The WINE team did.

> dont even mention WINE and other bullshit.

What's wrong with using WINE as a solution? If it works and works well, what's the problem?

According to Mandrake's site, they provide Mandrake Packs of Acrobat, Flash, Real, nVidia drivers, and other non-OSS software. Not 100% OSS.

That are the commercial boxes, e.g. the PowerPack edition. Yes, they accomodate people who prefer a commercial package for ease of use (no need to handle nVidia drivers etc. yourself) or other reasons.

The "100% OSS" applies to the Download editition (a comparison).

The latter is the one you can download for free. The former has been made available for download only for MandrakeClub members (silver and higher) and contributors as of ML9.2, and is sold as boxed set, too, of course.

But I doubt that Mandrake itself would use the 100% OSS label. IMHO, it's not really technically correct. They don't require all licenses to be OSI approved. AFAIK, they require the license to allow the software (source and binary) to be (re-)distributed freely on the the download edition. Which basically boils down to: the licenses usually fit into the OSI spirit, but aren't necessarily officially OSI approved.

Then what is this about?

Its just little things like that, that need to be ironed out of Mandrake and I think it'll be a great OS.

Indeed, but no-one is going to iron it out if it isn't reported.

This looks like a hotplug/coldplug issue. Does it come up if you boot up, remove the dongle and plug it back in?

It looks like this ight be your bug. Please subscribe to it, and/or add any additional info that would help use fix it.

Another issue may just be that the modules aren't loaded, you can hack around this by adding the necessary modules to /etc/modules

Considering that RMS seems to think even Debian isn't really a Free Software(tm) distro, I find it difficult to image that Mandrake qualifies.

On the 9.2 comparison chart you can clearly see that every version of Mandrake other than the Download edition includes plenty of proprietary software.

Take a look at the M's in Debian's non-free section and compare it to Mandrake's package list.

Don't get me wrong. Most of what I know about GNU/Linux I learned on Mandrake. Implying that it's the last of the free software distros is comical though.

Or other great user oriented distros out there.

Clickable http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/92/discovery

*Gleep*

Posted logged in so it will be seen, give me no mods

They do put out a separate distribution for the server arena. Sounds like it uses X for the install routine, but after that it's your basic stable Linux server.

Here.

...And I'm glad I went back, because I've been looking for a well-implemented Multi-Network Firewall product that can be deployed for free (as in no money) for a couple of my non-profit clients. Certainly, the for-profits don't mind spending $1000+ on a good firewall software package, but the non-profits (a charity and a church) have need for something like this, but simply can't afford a non-open-source package. Hoorary for Mandrake!

I've already renewed my Mandrake Club membership, and if you appreciate the work they do, you should think about doing so as well.

Mandrake, Corel, and VA Software are all losing money. It's particularly impressive just how proud VA is that they've only lost 3.7 million in the first quarter this year, as opposed to the 9.8 million they lost first quarter last year. And you can't exactly claim it's starting losses either, all 3 have been around for years.

Transgaming doesn't have financial information on their site, but they're a tiny (20 employees according to this June article) private Canadian company. While that's great for those 20 people, I don't think selling access to freely distributable software and asking people not to distribute it is really a scalable business model. Lindows is apparently another small (they claim 50 employees when trying to explain why they charge for click-n-run, who knows if it's accurate or not.) private company.

And Loki... You know.

SUSE may be the only other major profitable company there, I can't really tell since they also don't list financial information. (At least, not on their English site, and not that I could find on their German site with Babelfish.)

So, out of 8 Linux companies, one is (maybe 2 are, if SUSE is good.) large and profitable, 2 are small and private, 3 are large and losing money, and one already went bankrupt. Still not enough to really mean anything, but not quite as happy a picture as just considering Red Hat.

Did you bother to click the second link?

This can't be a hoax. You can also reach it by clicking through on their site.

mandrakesoft.com
-> Partners
-> Partner advertising options
-> Tada! "Advertising in Mandrake Linux 9.2 Edition".

According to the page where Mandrake explains this advertising scheme, they claim to have 3 million downloads of each release and another million copies purchased. So I think the "nobody wants it" statement is a little inaccurate.

See the notice on the Mandrake site.

I'm a Mandrake user and club member, and I don't like it. It doesn't seem likely to increase revenue sufficiently to warrant upsetting their faithful user base. It "cheapens" the distro in my mind, even though I know the underlying open source code isn't any different.

Most people who know how to download and burn the ISOs are probably savvy enough to remove the ads, though; I'll reserve final judgement until I see how invasive the ads appear to be. As others have pointed out, Mandrake has kept the ISOs available for free by not polluting the distro with commercial/non-free software, which is to their credit.

- Leo

Advertising:

- Installation advertising (for every Mandrake Linux 9.2 version) + bookmarks (for every Mandrake Linux 9.2 version): $ 7,000

- Screen saver advertising (only for the 9.2 download version): $ 10,000

- Installation advertising + bookmarks + screen saver advertising: $ 15,000

Follow this link.
To see the procing and information about this new advertising ;p I will reserve my feelings on this.

...fire up a few torrents and install the result. (-:

If you want to participate in the Mandrake PPC development, you can find more information in the Mandrake Ports Wiki.

If I posted link to nine-month-old news, I'd do it as an AC, too. How about something a little more recent?

If I was to ask Dell, HP, or IBM if Mandrake ran on their servers, they'd say "Maybe but don't ask for it in writing"

Since you specified "servers", I can't say that's untrue, but HP certainly says that Mandrake runs on desktops from HP, and the interview did talk a lot about Linux desktops.

Mandrake is a product of MandrakeSoft.

UnitedLinux is the parent company of SUSE, the European arm which produces SUSE Linux. There is also the Asian arm, TurboLinux, and the South American/Latin arm, Conectiva. Yep, all these major distributions fall under the same parent company. So you're pretty accurate in asserting that there's only a few big players as far as corporations go.

... you can follow the guidelines on their site, although it may also be helpful to post a link to an SRPM in your mail (which you should also cc to the cooker list, since the employee handling contribs is very busy, but there are a lot of non-employee contributors who will be able to add your package.

More and more development is being done by the community, so you may want to stop by the cooker wiki which may have more up-to-date documents than those on the Mandrakesoft website.

The $2,960 is to get support with it.

Imagine a CLIC cluster of these running a Linux-powered wi-fi access point that is used by an Apache web server that is hosting a site advocating the legal fight against SCO and the RIAA/MPAA which shares files using an open source P2P client developed at MIT or Berkely and has an Nvidia graphics card with special drivers that make increase performance under the goatse benchmark test application!

Well, I thought they took paypal, but it looks like they do not. You can snail mail them money orders and such, though. From their subscription page:

Sign up for a TransGaming subscription at $5 per month, with a minimum three-month payment. Once you have created an account and logged in, you will need to choose your subscription period and make your initial payment. We accept most major credit cards, but at this time we do not accept debit cards or American Express. You can also pay by international certified check or money order for subscriptions of twelve months of more (US Dollars only); we will activate your account as soon as we receive it. If you would like to pay by gift certificate, please send the gift certificate number to support@transgaming.com and we will activate your account.

Please be sure that you have read the Installation FAQ list and other documentation on this site to ensure that your hardware and software meet the minimum system requirements for WineX. Also note that WineX is a work in progress and not all Windows games are supported.

That second part is important, too. One of the biggies is your video card has to be supported fully (with 3d) under Linux. I found out that my built-in radeon on my motherboard will not cut it as ATI has not (yet?) given the right info/drivers for it. Last I checked, NVidia cards were supported up to the latest with drivers (I think) from their site, and ATI drivers are available through Radeon 8500. There are open-source Radeon drivers and the Nvidia drivers are closed source (but regularly updated).

Winex is free as in beer if you are willing/able to compile from CVS. I was not able to do this trivially before, but I may have had other problems which are now more apparent under my current Linux Distro. Subscription gives you the right to vote for games you want and gets you easier-to-install binaries. Source-based distributions actually make it easier to compile from cvs, but they are not for everyone. Another option is to purchase one of the distributions which comes with Winex and a subscription.

My current favorite source based distribution is also supposed to make it easier to install the nvidia drivers, though nvidia's instructions for manually doing this seemed straightforward. I have not tried this yet, but it is looking more and more like that is what I will do to alleviate my 3d problem. I had planned to buy a beefy video card anyway.

I would also encourage you to get involved with LUGS in your area both by meeting with them when they have meetings and by participating in their mailing lists. These are excellent sources of information. You can also email me at rifter0x0000 at yahoo dot com if you want more ideas/advice/etc.

Ultimately we need more Linux resources on the net to help people, and people who use linux need to be a resource. I also think it is important that Linux users settle for nothing less than total functionality, in other words we should be able to use Linux for everything you would want to use a computer for. That is almost true now, with some caveats, but I want to puzzle out and eliminate the caveats. I think anyone who can code or write documentation should work on this goal as well.

I hope that you have good luck in trying linux. If it does not work for you at first, try try again and seek help. I tried many distributions befor eI settled on one I woudl like for my purposes, and then I changed my mind again :). But remmeber Linux == choice and if you don't like something about it, it is likel

There you go, http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~quintela/supermoun t/ -- just add that patch to your kernel. Or use Mandrake kernel (or Mandrake itself if you want "easy to use" -distro). It's all free and happy pappy, so nobody is pissing against the wind.

SOME BASTARD CHILD OF XP AND OSX?!?!?!?

# Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
# Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page)

"annoying pleas for money?"

hate to break it to ya, already been done.

Your post implys, IMHO correctly, that no matter the steps taken to protect software against piracy, there will be piracy. However, there will emerge in the end a need to by software from a vendor in order to get support. Hmmmmm...

Seems to me there's a few companies out there who do something very much like that. Seems we have the answer for Microsoft, don't we?

Soko

Take a look at the Mandrake 9.1 Features Page and you will find a snazzy screenshot of K3B which would probably suit your needs. It looks pretty slick!

Did anyone else notice that the name of the user in the name of the user selected for the second screenshot is "Testi".

I bet they had a ball choosing that one :)

Now, I haven't followed this closely so I don't know if that's a little or a lot. I do remember that one version of Windows (2000? XP?) had over 64K bugs when it was released, so compared to that it's an order of magnitude and a half better. But I don't know how bad each bug is in either case, either, so this isn't much of a comparison.

(Btw, the total of the three I ignored is 1848, so about half the reported bugs have been fixed. Again, no data on the severity of the fixed vs. open bugs...)

and I abuse my broadband almost on a daily basis downloading a new distro to install and scrutinise. My impressions of Redhat 8 were very positive, it's the most polished major distribution around. But what's the deal with all the latest 2.4 kernels? Hardly any of them compile properly, and most kernel libs aren't included in default package installs. As far as I'm concerned, kernel compiling is absolutely necessary and most users at least have a clue on how to do it.

Also, there should be more Linux distributions with different/yet still complete desktops other than KDE. Don't get me wrong, KDE rocks but what's wrong with having Enlightenment as the primary GUI? And as refined as Gnome is, I don't see it included very often.

Finally, why is there not a distribution optimised for gaming? Gentoo has a special UT version and Mandrake has a Sims version pre-configured with Winex, but is that it?!

rant [on | off]

I'm gonna wait for the distro to pick it up, they'll make sure it's stable enough.

Depends which distros your talking about.. Some seem to care more about buzzwords than stability. But there are a few exceptions.

Personally, I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.. I don't pretend that I can help debug it in a meaningfull way...and this new version doesn't make my current version work one bit less.

Stability issues aside though, I'm overjoyed to hear that Radeon support is still improving. I'll pass a brick when DRI + Xinerama works with the OS Radeon drivers. Improving support for built in 3D chipsets is also great news. Even minimal performance is a godsend. These guys are doing great work.

Have you report all your problems to MandrakeSoft ? If not, Cooker Bugzilla is your friend (please, separate each problem in its own bug report). If you don't report bugs, you can't be sure we will be able to fix them all !!

Somehow old (it doesn't contains all the latest tweaking) screenshot of Galaxy GNOME

Did you report your problem to MandrakeSoft ? If not, Cooker Bugzilla is your friend.

This is an somehow old screenshot of Galaxy GNOME theme.. There have been some little changes since but the screenshot is quite right..

be warned unless you want to find and report bugs.

And if you do want to report bugs, they have BugZilla set up to make it really easy.

Sometimes it's difficult to determine which package things go in when reporting, but the developers have been very nice and helpful in moving my bugs around to the proper places. And as another comment mentioned, the turn-around time is quick.

Some sort of mixed breed of OS X and WinXP... some sort of freak of nature. Surely this was never meant to be! We must rid ourselves of this... horrible, horrible... thing.

• January 18th, 2003 - Mandrake Linux 9.1 Beta 2 is ready for download and testing. Two brand-spankin' new ISO images are now available at the usual download locations. Everyone is invited to participate as a beta tester and report any bugs to BugZilla.

Let's see... I insulted someone, missed the point, and posted redundant links. Yep, just about the perfect Slashdot post.

Mandrake is not going out of business, they are seeking protection from their creditors and will reorganize their business model. Bankruptcy allows a good business to overcome a mistake which would normally destroy the company. Selling enhancements to a free product is a good business model and one which can be highly profitable. The core of Mandrake is solid, it is the other avenues Mandrakesoft took to increase revenues which have faltered.

Looking at Mandrakesoft's investors, Vivendi is a major investor in the company and has deep pockets. Why do you think a relatively obscure French company can get highly visible and valuable shelf space at US stores like CompUSA.

I find the "Mandrake is for newbies" comments on Slashdot worse FUD than anything Microsoft puts out. Mandrake is a Linux distro and can be as easy or as difficult as on wants to make it. Nobody has to use or even install the the usability features of Mandrake and experienced users can do an expert text based install and create EXACTLY the system they want. This is not to mention that ease of use != newbie. Many highly experienced users prefer the simplicity which Mandrake offers knwoing that underneath it is Linux and can be adminstered either through the convenient supplied interface or via the command line ro by directly editing the configuration files.. Once you have gotten past the NEWBIE stage of impressing yourself with Linux, you realize it is just another OS spending hours configuring a machine is a waste fo time since that time could be spent actually doing something productive with the system.

From what I know, MandrakeSoft's filing is very similar to a U.S. Chapter 11. The announcement says:

" This reorganization of liabilities enables MandrakeSoft to continue its current operations, which are showing increases in revenue and significant decreases in expenses. [...]

Following this filing and with the support of the court via a court-appointed Administrator, MandrakeSoft will be protected from its creditors, renegotiate its liabilities and prepare a continuation plan to be approved by the French Court in the coming months."

BTW - Mandrake 9.1 Beta 2 was released today!

according to the actual announcement it looks very much like what we 'murkins would expect from Chapter 11

see for yourself.

Mandrake files for bankruptcy..

Sad to see this happening to Mandrake as well as seeing the article modded highest on Slashdot is plain wrong ...

Bye egghat.

"It's a bloated company based on free software that cannot."

That bloated company was Mandrake under the previous management team - the one who tried to turn it into some sort of e-Learning company, and increased its operating expenses by 400%, dot.com-style.

Mandrake sacked that management team, and cut costs drastically, but obviously not soon enough. During 2001-2002 their revenue increased 31% while reducing operating expenses by 42% - see here.

The current Mandrake may not be bloated any more, but they have a huge financial debt around their necks (not to mention long-term contracts entered into by the previous management team). Chapter-11 proceedings should help them cope with this, and if their customers don't desert them in the mean-time, they have a strong chance of survival. Ironically, this may be because they are end-user oriented more than corporate oriented - corporations will take fright from a company seen as failing, whereas end-users, I think, are more prepared to pay money simply for something they like that works.

There hasn't been much said recently by those who keep Mandrake's books.

Their page for latest financial information hasn't had an update in several weeks.

However, their last news indicated that for fiscal year 2001-2002, revenue increased 31% and they massively reduced operating losses.

I think in the end they will stay in business because of the strength of their products and community.