Mandrake for Alpha & UltraSPARC

Soko writes "Linux-Mandrake has joined SUSE, Red Hat and Caldera in porting their distribution to Alpha and SPARC architectures. The announcement was originally found on freshmeat and talks about getting help from Alpha Processors Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. MandrakeSoft has ported its latest popular version of the Linux operating system, Linux-Mandrake 7.0, to the above processors. "

Comments

Internationalization and localization

[dsplat]

Mandrake has been quite proactive is adding any available support for as many languages as possible. They have a localization page dedicated to it. They aren't the only organization working on it, but they are trying to make it widely available in an easily usable form. The Translation Project and Linux International which has sponsored mailing lists for it, have probably been doing it as actively as anyone else out there. There are other projects working on it as well:

• Linux Internationalisation Initiative
• Linux i18n Project, which is at least loosely affiliated with Mandrake since one of their employees is the contact for the project
• Free Mulitilingual Platforms
• Gnome and KDE have also both been actively pursuing internationalization

Re:Alpha has no future

[IntlHarvester]

Correct. When Compaq bought Digital, they were looking at the services division, and they probably didn't really have any idea what they were getting into. However, once looking at the books, they realized that the midrange business (Unix and VMS on Alpha) either was or could be enormously profitable.

The funny thing is, they originally thought DEC could be assimilated into Compaq's traditional Wintel-follower PC business, but then found out in order to really get that big midrange profit margin, Compaq had to essentially become Digital Equipment. This has led to a bunch of unresolved management turmoil and strategy shifts (reminiscent of DEC in the dark days), and probably explains why Compaq's current server equipment is so nice, and their desktop PCs are so crappy.
--

The creator of BeroLinux (=me) is now with Red Hat

[bero-rh]

Just a correction - I've left Mandrake in September to join Red Hat.

To stop rumors before they start coming up:

My primary reason for joining Red Hat was getting the changes that (IMO) make sense to as many people as possible. People who decide to try Linux should get the best possible distribution right away... (Instead of getting a bad impression of Linux because of the flaws of one distribution)

Another reason was safety. With Red Hat Linux getting better all the time (and merging back changes from Mandrake), I don't know how long there's room for an extended version of Red Hat Linux.

It's not a "rat leaving the sinking ship" thing. There is nothing wrong with Mandrake. There's also nothing wrong with Red Hat and most other Linux distributions.

Debian 2.1 has Alpha and Sparc.

[divec]

2.2 Will also add Power PC and ARM. m68k and i386 both already available of course.

Ok, someone explain this

[Khan]

Mandrake started out being based off of Redhat's distro. Basically, it was a cleaned up, supercharged version of RH. Have they now become their OWN distro? And if so, then why does v7 still include pleanty of RH specific software? Just curious.

What will it offer on those processors?

[szo]

I don't get it! Correct me if I'm wrong, but mandrake == RH && compiled to pentium. I guess the RH alpha port already is optimised for alpha, so what additional value will Mandrake offer?

Szo

Re:What will it offer on those processors?

[Jerenk]

The RH6.1 Alpha is relatively stable, but does have some problems. GNOME is particularly horrific on RH Alpha (causes HARD crashes - absolutely insane). Pretty much forces the use KDE. Also, the GNOME issues requires the removal of ALL Gnome RPMS (it still tries to tie in with KDE). Since I use KDE most of the time, it doesn't bug me except for the fact that I lose GDM. That really stinks. If someone has a decent replacement for GDM, I'd love to hear about it.

The GNOME issues that I see have occurred on both Alphas that I use. It is not something that I am doing wrong. =/

I'd also love to see FreeBSD use AlphaBIOS for its bootstrap instead of SRM. I don't want to use the SRM console! Ugh. AlphaBIOS is nice, and why is only Linux supporting it (NT does too)??

Later,
Justin

Who's Behind Mandrake?

[Effugas]

That's what I want to know: We know about all these stars at Redhat, and VA, and from everywhere else...

But who, I ask, is behind the smoothly polished quality of Mandrake?

The creator of BeroLinux joined the Mandrake project a long time ago, this much I remember. BeroLinux was not only a one man distribution but the first out of the gate with Kernel 2.2 up and running. Mandrake has alot of the feel of some one guiding force trying to catch all the loose ends--and it shows.

Yes, Mandrake 7.0 has areas of weakness that show up more than in any other Mandrake Linux distribution. Growing pains happen, and Mandrake's actually striking out with its own code this time around--and it's impressive code at that. Are Lothar and DiskDrake being ported to Alpha and Sparc as well?

You know, one of these days I'm just going to put up a clock "Days till Redhat acquires Mandrake"...

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Re:Who's Behind Mandrake?

[bero-rh]

it seems like Mandrake is always a step ahead of Red Hat

Not necessarily. It's always a matter of when a release is made.
Usually the one who made the last release is a steap ahead. ;)

<I>if Red Hat acquires Mandrake, I'm honestly not sure if those type of innovations would continue</I>

I don't see this acquisition happening anytime soon (DISCLAIMER: I'm a programmer, not a business person. I don't know about future acquisition plans. I haven't said it won't happen, I haven't said it will.) - but even if it happened, innovations would go on.
Check out all the work Red Hat has been doing in the past (and is doing right now - have you seen the new configuration tools we're working on? Check Raw Hide).

Red Hat IS a place for innovation.

Re:In other news....

[Kid Zero]

You know, someone has a complete set of these, customized for each area of North America. I'd love to find this person and nuke him.

Mandrake porting what to the Alpha/Sparc?

[Sri Lumpa]

Linux-Mandrake has joined SUSE, Red Hat and Caldera in porting their distribution to Alpha and SPARC architectures

You mean they ported their changes to Redhat Linux to the Alpha, right?

Mandrake Linux are clever in the way they produce their distro by basing it on RedHat, this make less development cost and is compatible with one of the best distros around (ok, some will prefer Debian (or Corel?), Suse, Caldera or Slackware, I know, no need for a flame war) but at least they play the game by contributing to the development of Linux contrary to a certain society that doesn't seem to be able to understand the spirit of the community on behalf of which they wish to make money (do i need to give a name?), furthermore they are French, like me ;)

Potential MS-Killers

[drnomad]

These Linux products ported for Alpha are potential Microsoft killers. As Compaq quit their project on porting Windows NT to Alpha (and MS said 'we don't care anyway') Microsoft's future could get very rough.

If you look at the problems of Intel, trying to get their Merced up and running (last I heard they got about 450 Mhz clock speeds?), there could be a problem in the evolution of ever increasing processor speeds.

The ports of multiple Unices / Linuces to the Alpha in combination with the Intel / Microsoft problems could change the rules.

Well, we won't see anything of it by tomorrow, but maybe within 2 years or so?

....these were just some thoughts

Re:Potential MS-Killers

[Soko]

Thats' the general idea.

The company I work for standardized on the NT/Alpha platform several years ago. Now that we have no OS, we have to pick out of 3 scenarios to get file and print services to our many Mac and Windoze client machines:

Win2K on Intel
TRU64 and a package called TAS on the Alpha's
Alpha Linux with netatalk and Samba

We're just starting out on our descision making process, and if I have my way, it'll all boil down to value - bang per buck spent. Last year, NT4.0 on Alpha provided the answer to that equation. One machine could serve 80+ G3 and G4 clients without breaking a sweat - I've seen Intel boxes of equivelent MHz and RAM melt with just 20 G3s. Seems to be a result of the huge I/O requirements. I can't see _anything_ in the IA32 architecture coming close to that while staying in the right price range.

Myself , I want to keep the Alphas and get the benefits of Linux. Using Linux sweetens the bang/buck equation even more. I just have to embark on an anti-FUD campaign - you know, counter the "Who's supporting this? Can we sue if it doesn't work?" and other PHB talk. Oh, and prove netatalk 1.4 is stable, even though it's a beta.

BTW, I have a lengthy paper on why the Alpha, it's instruction set and architecture are superior to the Merced (every time I say Itanium I get a twitch X-/), and when I find the URL for it, I'll post it - seems to have disapeared from the Compaq web site.

Re:Potential MS-Killers

[autechre]

Actually, that's not entirely correct. Windows NT already runs on alphas (no comment on "runs"), albeit not as well as on comparable X86 hardware, since it has to go through a translator first. Compaq decided a while ago that since MS was not really helping it with AlphaNT, they were going to stop working on it. So, it is already "ported", but there were going to be no more updates. However, I believe Compaq may have done an about-face on this after much howling from their customers (not sure about this one). Also, for a very long time (maybe still?) Win2K would not boot on IA-64 CPUs, so the 64-bit development was being done on Alphas. This means that it's certainly possible to see Win2k on the alpha CPU, but we shall see.

Personally, I have a Multia running linux, and it's a decent X-terminal. All this Windows-whatever doesn't really affect me, I'm waiting for someone to compile Linux with DECs compilers (shown to produce plenty of speed improvement over compiling with gcc for Alpha).

Not Just Redhat

[Ryandav]

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.

How portable is Linux, GNU, etc.?

[dsplat]

Given that the Linux kernel has been ported to a number of different architectures, and gcc supports lots of processors, my question is: How portable is Linux and the software that runs under it? The GNU tools are extremely portable. That has always been one of their design criteria. But how easy is it to take all of it and port it to new hardware?

One very good reason for asking this question is that widespread use of highly portable free software might encourage innovation in new processors. If the processor manufacturers know that they can port a mature OS with lots of tools to their new architecture with little effort, then the risk goes down.

Mandrake and Redhat

[Raleel]

I have to say that Mandrake was one of the best things to happen to Redhat. Here's why. Let.s start with redhat 5.2 (which is the first distribution that Mandrake used to my knowledge). Redhat had a solid system going there. But what was it missing? That feel that would allow new-to-linux users to get a feel for the whole thing. They had that FVWM95 interface in the gui. Yucky...So Mandrake says, "Hey...let's put Kde on Redhat!" and what do you have? A really nice way to get the average windows user into linux (trust me, I pulled 20 this way). So Redhat says, "Well, sheeeet! Look at Mandrake...we gotta get some interface action going here guys!" and then the saga of enlightenment and gnome happens. And we have redhat 6.0. Well, Mandrake says, "yea, ok, they got a gui now, we can concentrate on bug fixes and updating kernels" and then we have mandrake 6.0 (with 2.2.x kernel). So then Redhat says, "Well, damn! Those Mandrake guys are on the ball!" And Caldera says, "Heh, ok guys, we'll do ya one better...We'll have a GUI INSTALLER! Hah! Top that!" And redhat says, "Ok, we gotcha there...and now we offer gnome AND kde! Eat it!" And mandrake says, " ok ok ok! You know what sucks about linux? It is such a pain to repartition your hard drive (you gotta actually BUY something to resize!) So here it is, DiskDrake! Stuff it! And here's Lothar to kick you when your down! Oh yea, redhat? We're gonna take your Sparc and Alpha ports and do the same stuff that we have been doignto them TOO!"

I really really love open source for this...it speeds up the development cycle! Next thing you know, Redhat is going to have all of this and probably Xfree86-4 for it's next version. Of course, mandrake will follow suite shortly after, but probably with 2.4 kernel...oh, it is so cool ;)