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It's probably not that safe/secure, if the 'admin' can't login to verify the update actually worked,

Well, the output of the log file that gets emailed to the user account would verify the update. You wouldn't need root privileges to view that and assuming whoever is in charge of grepping through it does their job, it could be possible that no updates have failed. I generally run my updates through test systems before going into production machines.

or periodically check the update didn't unexpectedly do something stupid like leave a world-writable executable (that a critical program runs in a privileged context from time to time).

In mandrake, msec is installed as a base tool. It can be loaded adjusted and loaded in other distros with some minor work but I believe that there is already something similar in most other distros. For instance Ubuntu has Tiger, Denyhosts, and tripwire, which are all likely to be able to be installed on other distros as well as other tools like SELinux.

Now don't get me wrong, and please understand that I'm not saying a system set up in this way "will" remain secure. I'm saying that it is possible to remain secure for quite a while without the root passwords and there can be situations where years go by before anything or anyone needs the root password. Distros will usually drop support for the distro (unless it's debian which seems to take 10 years to move the stable branch to unsupported. Or it did a few years ago) before a well secured *nix box gets compromised. Scripts to provide reports covering all you mentioned and probably more have been and can be set up in almost any distro. One of my favorite distros has been doing it since 1999/2001 for addon options and base installs. These scripts can be enough to maintain a reasonable level of assurance that everything is fine and the person reviewing them doesn't need a root password at all. I am also talking about Unix/Linux systems, not a windows box. While something like this may be possible in a windows box, it is less likely to just work without a root password or the Sudo equivalent.

Add additional support like Snort, properly configured firewalls, umask set up right and so on, years can go by before anyone ever needs the root password.

BTW Mandrake has beenMandriva for years.

*duh* Guess it shows that I haven't used it for a while :)
Since right before the name change I think. Their "bleeding edge" philosophy did indeed lead to a number of packages being flaky in each release. It was kind of tiresome in the long run. There's a middle ground between Debian stable and Mandriva I think.

desktop distributions such as Mandrake

I was a Mandrake fan for years as well. Though I wouldn't say it was ever "just worked" simply that a much higher percentage of stuff worked well enough. I still like it quite a bit. BTW Mandrake has beenMandriva for years.

Ive stuck with MDK/MDV since MDV8.1, but I do understand GPs problem.

Every now and then Mandriva produce a bad release, 2005-LE was peculiarly odoriferous, 9.2 and one of the 2007 releases were also rather poor. 2008.0 and 2008.1 were good (apart from an ugly backport of Firefox when FF2 went out of service), but then they went to KDE4 far to early with MDV 2009.0, which hasn't worked too well.

FWIW, Im thinking 2009.1 is going to be one of the better releases.

The Mandriva website really was useless, I couldn't even re-find solutions to problems I'd previously had solved (e.g. an odd xorg.conf for my monitor). Its a lot better today, but there is still an odd gap between the main site and the place all the really useful information is kept.

What I really dont get is this love for Ubuntu. Its about as good as any other distro.

Ive stuck with MDK/MDV since MDV8.1, but I do understand GPs problem.

Every now and then Mandriva produce a bad release, 2005-LE was peculiarly odoriferous, 9.2 and one of the 2007 releases were also rather poor. 2008.0 and 2008.1 were good (apart from an ugly backport of Firefox when FF2 went out of service), but then they went to KDE4 far to early with MDV 2009.0, which hasn't worked too well.

FWIW, Im thinking 2009.1 is going to be one of the better releases.

The Mandriva website really was useless, I couldn't even re-find solutions to problems I'd previously had solved (e.g. an odd xorg.conf for my monitor). Its a lot better today, but there is still an odd gap between the main site and the place all the really useful information is kept.

What I really dont get is this love for Ubuntu. Its about as good as any other distro.

I haven't ever seen or tried it, but there is Pulse from Mandrake:

http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/products/pulse

I don't know much about it (other than reading about it on their web site) but Mandriva has an Enterprise desktop management system for both Windows and Linux desktops called Pulse2:

http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/en/products/overview

I'm a long time Mandriva user on desktops, laptop, and servers, but all in a small business or personal environment, and it works well for me... I don't claim to know anything about Enterprise.

I hope not. I'm have used kubuntu since 0606 and been happy about it and recommended it to everybody. But I stayed on 0804 with still has kde 3.5, and now I'm looking for an alternative distro.

Ubuntu / Kbuntu are bastardized distros. Ubuntu has to learn that there's a difference between trying to create a more user-friendly distro and "more Windows-like experience". And Xubuntu is a mess.

Try openSUSE (and use this link to get all the media codecs with one click). Try Fedora. Try Mandriva Heck, try Slackware.

"she wouldn't be able to do anything without going through an insane amount of dialogs trying to get her digital camera recognized, her pic(s) 'fixed', and finally email them to her family/friends/whatever."

Hi. You obviously have not used a recent Linux distro. A lot of people recommend Ubuntu (it is my second favorite), but I prefer Mandriva.

True story. My niece (she's 10) recently sent me a picture she had created using a program called "GIMP" that came on the netbook I bought for my sister. I was so pleasantly surprised I started sending her back versions of her picture using various GIMP filters. After commenting on how cool some of the pictures were, she finally said that people would think that I was a weirdo for being so in to pictures of ponies . . .

Many distros such as SUSE, Mandrake and Red Hat are still around in various incarnations

Mandrake started out well, but then suffered some sort of identity crisis, had a sex change, and become the totally flakey bitch named Mandriva. Some say she's been to rehab and is much nicer now, but she is ancient history as far as I'm concerned.

Mandriva comes in two flavors: One, and Free. The Free version is just what it sounds like: 100% free software. No proprietary browser plugins, drivers, apps, etc.

"There's so such thing as a free lunch! Either it's stolen or they'll be cheating you somehow"

Just nod your head in agreement and then point him here.

the latest version of Mandriva will neither logout nor shutdown, instead choosing to hang indefinitely.

It's unfortunate that it doesn't work well for you, but it works fine for many other people. Have you filed a bug already?

However, there IS still timing trouble (laggyness) exactly as you describe. Here's the details of my current report, Athlon 3500+ with integrated NVida 6150 (buried alive by Compiz Fusion with tons of glitz: rotating cube, two kinds of mouse-based window selectors, wobbly windows, etc.). Your box seems to be nearly twice as fast as my old one, running Linux.

Failed 3 tests.
Test 26 passed, but took 306ms (less than 30fps)
Test 39 passed, but took 36ms (less than 30fps)
Test 40 passed, but took 69ms (less than 30fps)
Test 46 passed, but took 57ms (less than 30fps)
Test 65 passed, but took 124ms (less than 30fps)
Test 69 passed, but took 3 attempts (less than perfect).
Test 71 passed, but took 183ms (less than 30fps)
Test 77 failed: expected '4776' but got '6980' - getComputedTextLength failed.
Test 78 failed: expected '90' but got '0' - getRotationOfChar(0) failed.
Test 79 failed: expected '34' but got '33' - SVGSVGTextElement.getNumberOfChars() incorrect
Total elapsed time: 4.85s

I'll SWAG that test 77 is due to either unimplemented downloadable text (leading to selection of an alternate font already present on my box), or differences in Linux versus Windows font sizings of a font which is already available. Test 78 is clearly just not implemented at all, and Test 79 seems to be just a "minor" rounding error in something which is already implemented.

My build now includes a bunch of further Tracemonkey JIT fixes and enhancements which landed on the tree AFTER the beta branch was cut. I ran acid3 twice, and the second run was a bit faster than the first-- second results show above. But I've got oodles of other tabs open at the same time, and didn't bother to check out how much they hurt my results.

Mandriva 2009, which was released last week, already includes a very late release candidate and then will soon provide the update to the final release. Source

http://bugzilla.mandriva.com/ There ya go. :)

Um, Mandrake/Mandriva has *always* been a commercial company with commercial offerings. But they have also *always* offered free versions of the distro. And this is what Redhat did before they went completely commercial-only, and what SuSE still does.

http://www.mandriva.com/en/download/free

I'm not sure how it could take you weeks - SDL is just one source RPM, so all the patches applied to it are right there...

http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/cooker/SDL12/current/SOURCES/

there's two Pulse patches.

We provide the latest code X.org has for all drivers, and the hardware detection database is maintained. Aside from that there isn't an awful lot we can do to help older neglected drivers - even if we had the time to devote to maintaining ancient X drivers (which we mostly don't), we don't have the hardware around to test. But we do what we can.

You might want to look at the Reviewer's Guide: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Reviewers_Guide

it contains a lot of that kind of information.

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Choosing_the_right_edition

Basically, One is a hybrid live/install CD which includes proprietary drivers and browser plugins. Free is a traditional installer edition (2xCD or DVD) which is 100% free / open source software, no NVIDIA / ATI drivers or anything (though you can add them from the non-free repository after install, if you're that way inclined).

'From now on, contract with the BIG BOYS in Linux, Red Hat, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Suse. No more gOS. no more *insert Bizzare distro no one has ever heard of here* distro.' In fact, Mandriva is offering to OEMs a version called (see http://www.mandriva.com/enterprise/en/company/press/mandriva-announces-a-new-solution-for-netbooks-mandriva-mini") Mandriva Mini which will be customized for their particularly hardware.

I have two options for you: Mandriva or openSUSE. I have both of them installed and of the two I would prefer openSUSE as it just feels so much better than any other Linux distro. Check the hardware requirements before installing:
openSUSE Hardware Compatibility List
Mandriva Hardware Compatibility List

This can also affect Mandriva Linux 2009 pre-releases. To be clear, the bug is in the upstream kernel itself, not in any code specific to any distribution.
It affects any 2.6.27rc kernel, whether it's in a distribution or a clean upstream build.
We have posted a full, detailed notification of the issue for Mandriva users.

the best kde based bleeding edge distro is still mandriva. Though you'll need the unstable (cooker) version. There probably will be a beta of the next release soon.
The one that comes with KDE4.1? http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Beta_1

We already did, it's called Mandriva Flash. It's been on sale for a couple of years now.

Mandriva allows you to choose between purist and pragmatist versions. Just check the appropriate radio button when you download.

Gentoo only installs non-free stuff if you tell it to do so, since you have complete control over the entire installation process and everything is built from the source.

I'm sure there are other well known distributions that offer a choice is well.

Ubuntu's backports repositories are far smaller and less active than Mandriva's (just do a file listing on both and have a look). In practice, most 'backports' for Ubuntu are done via PPAs or just via projects posting packages on their websites, which I find a much more messy and potentially problematic system than a centralized backports repository (although it seems to work out okay for most people most of the time).

It is true that Ubuntu has slightly more packages than Mandriva (last I checked it was in the region of 20% more), mainly thanks to its Debian heritage. You can file a request for new packages at Bugzilla if you come across something useful that's not packaged.

I know Ubuntu works the same way as Mandriva with regards to official updates (in fact they're more conservative, if anything) - I did mention that most other distros do the same in my reply, and honestly I was a bit confused by the OP overall, as I don't see how what he wrote can actually be true...

Well, use the live CD - that way if it doesn't work well, you haven't lost anything. That's usually the best way to test any distro.

The problem with your idea is that when something has just been released there aren't any reviews of it :). So there wouldn't be one to link to. Later in the cycle we'll have a Release Tour - see the 2008 Spring tour for an example of how this looks - but there wouldn't be any point making this for 2009 yet as it's still nowhere near complete and looks nothing like the final 2009 will.

If you just want to check out how MDV looks these days I wouldn't recommend touching this with a barge pole. Grab the 2008 Spring live CD (One) from the download page instead, and try that. It's changed a lot since the 8.x / 9.x days.

Well, use the live CD - that way if it doesn't work well, you haven't lost anything. That's usually the best way to test any distro.

The problem with your idea is that when something has just been released there aren't any reviews of it :). So there wouldn't be one to link to. Later in the cycle we'll have a Release Tour - see the 2008 Spring tour for an example of how this looks - but there wouldn't be any point making this for 2009 yet as it's still nowhere near complete and looks nothing like the final 2009 will.

If you just want to check out how MDV looks these days I wouldn't recommend touching this with a barge pole. Grab the 2008 Spring live CD (One) from the download page instead, and try that. It's changed a lot since the 8.x / 9.x days.

If you're running a server why would you *want* to upgrade to the latest shiny version of XYZ all the time? That's just a recipe for pain.

My servers are still on Mandriva 2008. They'll run that till 2009 comes out. Or possibly 2009 Spring. Why waste time updating them to the Latest Spanking Shiny Version of Everything if they don't actually need it? In case you didn't know, Mandriva (like every other sensible distro) does not necessarily do full version upgrades to fix security issues. What that means is that if there's a security issue in XYZ 1.0 and it's fixed by XYZ 2.0, which also introduces a bunch of other changes, we won't update our XYZ package to 2.0 in the official update repositories, we'll backport the security fix to 1.0 and issue 1.0-1.1mdv (or whatever). So don't assume that because the version number of a distro package is not the absolute latest, it's vulnerable to some kind of security issue; it probably isn't. All decent distros have security mailing lists to help you keep on top of this kind of thing; if you run remotely accessible servers you really should subscribe to your distro's.

For those who always like to be on the bleeding edge of everything, we have the backports repositories, which are probably the most extensive such of any distro.

Sounds like you may be interested in the Mandriva Flash, then: http://www.mandriva.com/en/product/mandriva-flash-2008-spring

The honest person in me would also point out that there are various free takes on the same idea, in exchange for you doing a bit of elbow work to install it. There was a community-developed Mandriva branch called MCNL that did this for a long time, though it's currently stagnant. I believe there's also community-developed USB images for Ubuntu and Fedora.

Most distributions adopted the Liberation fonts more than a year ago. At least Fedora and Mandriva did.

This really shouldn't be news, as the Debian license-police usually delay introduction of anything new with unnecessary (see links in article) license haggling.

As far as I can see, the exception on the liberation fonts makes the "software" more free, whereas the Tex csplain additional restriction makes the software less free (one of the freedoms is lost).

The GPL incompatibility is also moot, since no other software will be derived works (taking into account the first exception, stating that embedding of the fonts in a document does not constitute a derived work).

So, no, other distributions need not follow, Debian is playing catch-up.

You can find its wiki page here (With the download links):
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/XfceLive

Here is a review:
http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2008/05/05/06/45/29-mandriva-linux-one-2008-spring-x

It's a community version but its package selection is in the official Mandriva tool to build LiveCD ( http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Draklive ) .

You can find its wiki page here (With the download links):
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/XfceLive

Here is a review:
http://beranger.org/index.php?page=diary&2008/05/05/06/45/29-mandriva-linux-one-2008-spring-x

It's a community version but its package selection is in the official Mandriva tool to build LiveCD ( http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Draklive ) .

Check it out. You can use a 100% free version of Mandriva Distro, or you can Download a Live CD version, wich containts all drivers and common plugins for free. So, you want 100% free software ? Go ahead with Mandriva. Do you need drivers for your hardware distributed by commercial license ? Go ahead, buy a mandriva's commercial pack

In addition to what other /.ers said about WUBI, there's also the possibility to use Live USB distribution.
PenDrive Linux has a lot of resources about this kind of distributions.
I've been using their Quick and easy Pendrivelinux for quite some time.
You can buy commercial preinstalled ones from companies like Mandriva Flash.

It works to a very similar way to WUBI, but on a flash drive.
Essentially it puts 2* big files that contain the file system on the USB drive, and make the USB stick bootable using "syslinux". You start it by hitting F12 when the BIOS starts and choose to boot on the USB drive instead of your hard drive.
(whereas WUBI puts a big file with the partition /on the windows drive/ and adds a new entry to the Windows boot loader to make the system. So you boot you hard drive normally and then use Windows XP's boot menu to select Linux instead of WinXP).

So in that solution, your hard drive is virtually untouched (not that creating a file and adding an entry are *that* much big change) so it may please more the paranoid admins at your company.

Last-but-not-least there's also the running-Linux-inside-Virtualbox (or some other virtual machines that have native-speed performance) solution. It's a bit complicated, but has the benefit of letting you run your Linux apps along side the Windows desktop (with possibilities for native integration, either using a X-Window server for Win32, or using the virtual machine's client tools).

* - most Live USB solutions tend to use 2 files : one is a big read-only file containing the live system, the other is read-writeable and used to store and remember modification (newly installed software, upgrades, user settings, user's home, etc.) between session.
This is because most Live USB distribution are descendant of Live CD distribution (where the CD-Rom is read only and holds the live distro and a RAM-disk holds the modification, using a UNIONFS to bridge the 2 together).
The big advantage of this system is that in case of a big fuckup, you can still reboot using only the original live system (just like a LiveCD) and fix/rebuild/create a new read-write big file.
Of course there are also other solutions for partitioning and installing linux on a USB stick the same way you install it on a harddrive.

We could have MP3 playback, but not DVD playback. DVD playback of protected DVDs (in the US at least) requires breaking of the DMCA. Abolishing patents would not solve this. Granted, there are legal ways to play back DVDs on Linux, but most people who use Linux don't want to pay to pay the licensing fee. You have to pay the licensing fee on Windows, or on any other implementation. So I don't see the reason you shouldn't have to pay for it on Linux.

If your requirements are that you want to use patent-encumbered media formats, Microsoft-owned fonts and proprietary network protocols then it's no wonder that you're going to struggle with an operating system that ships only with free software. You might have better luck with something like Mandriva Powerpack.

I had a similar problem with Mandriva and mythbuntu, it is possibly the install using video modes unsupported by the monitor.

I used drakx11 to get things working

Because we are sure they did use the same tactic already on a market where the Classmate is sold with Linux:
http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/

Can't we accept that maybe the wintel evil couple still exist?

Ubuntu (and I guess that means kubuntu) is also moving to pulseaudio. [...] It's a high priority for hardy heron.

No. You, sir, are full of crap. When you look at what's actually used and widely recognized in the world of Linux (especially for desktops), you'll plainly see that there are several "mainstream" distros that garner the lion's share of attention and represent the vast majority of the installed base:

In no particular order:

(1) Red Hat Linux

(2) Fedora Linux (community bleeding-edge source for Red Hat)

(2) Mandriva Linux (used to be Mandrake)

(3) Ubuntu Linux (plus variants, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc)

(4) SUSE Linux (owned by Novell these days)

(5) Gentoo Linux

Yes, we also have Debian, Slackware and many others that don't necessarily have huge commercial ties, but they're also the base for many commercial distros. You might be using Linux From Scratch, or one of several dozen other random distros with has an installed base of 100 users, but if that's the case you're pretty far from the average desktop or server Linux user.

My Apache logs tell the story pretty well. As Captial One might say, what's in your logfiles?

Hey! They might want to check with Microsoft to see how they pulled this off in Nigeria. http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/ Maybe they were dealing in just too small a bribe!

Please do not judge Linux by Ubuntu. I have NEVER had more trouble getting the basics to "just work" as I had under Ubuntu. If you want it to "just work" and have Crossover built in for your Windows Apps, Try Xandros(free trial here). If you want it to "just work" and don't want to spend any money,try PCLinuxOS or Mandriva Free. I know this will probably kill my karma, but IMHO any of the above would be better for switching someone from Windows than Ubuntu. For all the hype about Ubuntu, I've never had more pain trying to get everything running from any other OS, except maybe Fedora 4(shudder).

François, from Mandriva

Says it all.

http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/

Why does MS insist on exhibiting NO CLASS?
Duck Amuck?
Ignore them and hopefully they'll go away.
(blush - is MY BIAS showing - blush, bats eyelashes to looney tunes soundtrack)

http://www.sarakadee.com/feature/2002/12/images/animate_02.jpg

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/7/7c/Looney_Tunes.png

http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/31/an-open-letter-to-steve-ballmer/

"We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. Maybe you heard about it, Steve. They were looking for an affordable hardware+software solution for their schools. The initial batch was 17,000 machines.
...
And then, today, we hear from the customer a totally different story: "we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward." MS knows how to play this game...or they just invent their own set of rules :(

Yeah, he should be using a better distro like Mandriva, which can play them perfectly legally if you pay for the powerpack version. And it costs only $59 for the download version, or $89 for the boxed version. Much cheaper than Vista.

Mandriva said it will not sign that deal with Microsoft :
http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/06/19/we-will-not-go-to-canossa/

Has nothing to do with urpmi, but with the packaging of truecrypt. You can file bugs for issues like this at http://bugzilla.mandriva.com/ , where they will be addressed.

autopackage is not the answer to all ills. for instance, the way autopackage is configured by upstream to operate on Mandriva will interfere with the operation of the regular Mandriva packages. it's also completely unsuitable for anything particularly complex or low-level, it really only works well for simple application-level stuff. it's not a bad idea, but it does not solve all problems, and the way it's implemented currently is not great and is definitely not supported by the Mandriva development community.

I post in various places in a manner appropriate to that place. that is, I post on slashdot in a manner broadly appropriate to the typical approach of slashdot users - blunt and direct. I find this is appreciated more than using an all-purpose smiling corporate drone approach in all environments.

"Is this any better now? Do you still have to hunt for 3 hours on the interwebs to figure out how to install anything that didn't come with the distro?"

No. No, you don't, and you haven't for several years, as I said. Please read:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tasks/Installing_and_removing_software

it explains it all rather clearly.