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MandrakeSoft Covered in Upside
oleo wrote to us about MandrakeSoft's latest popular coverage in Upside. Talks a bit about the roots of the system, some quotes from Red Hat about Open Source Software, and some of MandrakeSoft's potential future plans. They also have a little commentary on the LinuxOne history as well.
Try using a rawrite of the boottext.img next time and you'll be able to use the old installer. There is also a work around for unsupported Vid Cards in the install manual.
Drop by #gnome anytime and listen to the RedHat developers talk about KDE.
Why doesn't the GNOME install install the KDE libraries?
RE: Their install is their main selling point, and I can understand that you don't give a fuck about an X based install (I could do without it, that's for sure), but man! their partitioning utility is AWESOME. RedHat's disk druid sucks...
I ended up buying Mandrake since I was in a hurry for a demo and couldn't get RedHat 6.1 to install properly. Signal 11 !!!! when writing the partition information. I already had four primary partitions on my EIDE drive and RH faulted every single damned time I tried to install it. Mandrake did no better. Signal 11 !!!!
So, I removed a FAT partition. Signal 11 !!!! Damn! Removed an NTFS partition, so now there are 2 primary partitions available for the ext2 and swap partitions. Signal 11 !!!!! Deleted another NTFS partition. Signal 11 !!!! Damn. Deleted my BFS (BeOS 4.5.2) partition. Linux installed. WTF?
Yeah, I remember installing RedHat 5.2 (and this was in March last year!) being met by that hideous Another Level desktop(?). Once I found out about KDE some month later, Linux became learnable. (Not that I use KDE now, since I've learned how to use Linux).
Don't feed the trolls.
Are you sure paper towels are enough? It might require bleach.
IOW, the world's most popular distribution is stuck to using GNOME as default and KDE will never make it.
Well, like Mandrake 6.1, 7.0...
:p
Now RedHat follows Mandrake
Everyone complained how "Mandrake is a RedHat rip-off!"
Heh, well, looks like Mandrake is putting some serious competeition on RH now. Congrats guys...*likes watching the OS community grow*
Like grits? Who doesn't!
Slashdot moderators are on crack, not acid. Acid might make them acquire a certain level of creativity or transcendency they simply don't possess.
But who will metamoderate the metamoderators?
Dearest little trolly, didn't your mamma tell you not to play with your food before you eat it?
Oh are you the berolinux guy.
I followed the links from RedHat to a page devoted to discussing sig 11 errors, and the only relevant information was a report that some other people had the same problem.
At first I thought that *maybe* I did have some bad memory, even though NT4.0, BeOS, and MS-DOS all ran without complaints. But the signal 11 happened at the same point in every installation -- right after I had created the partitions and the install moved on to the next step, which I'd guess would be to actually write the info to the partition table.
I don't particularly care to try the install again with the same setup, but it installed perfectly only after I had deleted the last partition on the drive -- a 4GB BFS partition.
Oh well, there's nothing like a virgin hard drive.
thanks anway,
me
P.S. RE: the Mission to Mars discussion. Don't watch Prophecy III, either -- it was embarrassing to see Christopher Walken in such a terrible movie.
If asking about LinuxOne is off-topic when the article mentions LinuxOne, 3/4ths of all posts to /. are off-topic!
. . . can't someone just wipe it off? Surely someone has some paper towels . . .
Ok, this may be flamebait, but honestly, HOW can anyone call Red Hat's interface crappy and then claim Mandrake (which is pure Red Hat at the core) is far superior?? The installation program for Mandrake 7.02 is pure crap. RH6.2 blows the snot out of Mandrake 7.02. Just MHO.
I installed 5 different distros on the same machine last week and Mandrake 7.02 was the only one that worked perfectly. Also... There seems to be some other differences between Mandrake and Redhat besides the install. I could not get an MP3 to play smoothly in RH6.2 no matter what I did. The sound would sputter every now and then. MP3 playback is flawless under Mandrake though.... same hardware, same player, same soundcard, same IRQ/DMA. Go figure.
i used to like mandrake : i installed 5.2, 6.0
.... or crash the kernel
...
....
with satisfaction but when it comes to 7.0v2...
I encountered numerous problems in the install perharps because i run it in expert mode
like PCI detection crashing the install, X detection crash, crash when you try to see what s up in virtual consoles...
so after relaunching install many times i finally
get a working install (with X half installed due the X config crash) i tryied to set my desktop prefs to WM but everytime i log i had to select WindowMaker (annoying...).
and the biggest probleme was rpm bug . I launch rpm and it fills up the memory( in 5 secondes)then i fills up th swap (in 10 seconds) and then crash!
or crash the X server
nothing to do : even the magic sysrq combo can get it to cleanly quit
so after one day of configuring... installing.. and crash'n'rebooting i finished install mdk 6.1 (coming from a 6.0 this is not a big advance)
so a 'for the newbies' is good but when is is 'for the newbies only(!)'
with all of that i think that when the next mdk will come out i ll test it on an tiny partition before upgrading the whole system..
--
Microsoft : sampling noise at 44kHz and selling it to the world
After reading this article, I just about wet myself from excitement. I am downloading Mandrake's distribution now!!!
I installed Mandrake once.... I then reinstalled radhat. (IT WAS EVIL!)
I was very pleased to see a fairly mainstream publication cover Mandrake's model, why this is considered acceptable -- even desirable -- in the open source world, and the difference between Mandrake and LinuxOne.
Enough coverage like this and more people might start to understand the rules and mores of the open source community, and why it's as effective as it is at getting things done. Rather than fight things out in court, things are fought -- and borrowed and exchanged -- in the market.
If only the hard core free market capitalist types would wake up and realize that open source is one of the closest approximations there is to a classic free market. But I suppose free markets are too unpredictable and not profitable enough...
The Cal Poly LUG was doing an install shindig in January with Mandrake 7.0... and one machine just wouldn't go to the graphical part of the install. I thought it was because he (like me) had an unsupported card and the framebuffer didn't work. And of course there's no way to fallback to the text installer...
(BTW... Caldera's X-based installer worked fine for him.)
--Ben (very happy with Mandrake 6.1, thanks) August
--Ben
Good way to get credibility: swear at your opponent. -1, flamebait.
Isn't the Karma Whore thing a little tired?
Yup, infact I stopped almost 8 months ago. +1, informative.
Sure, I'm the one who's going to be marked as flamebait
*sarcasm* Was it that obvious? */sarcasm*
- Long time /. reader.
No comment. -1, overrated.
Had to stop reading when I got to "Jack _in_ the Beanstalk". If they can't get something right that isn't related to the article I can't trust them to get the facts straight on the rest of it.
Anyone heard anothing from/about them recently?
IIRC, their IPO was initially set for late January or early February and evidently hasn't happened yet. Also, their web site looks like it hasn't been updated in a while.
I had to read that twice to understand it. I kept seeing Signal 11, and wondering if this AC was a friend of his asking for help or something...
----
"So, I removed a FAT partition. Signal 11 !!!!"
--
"What about him?"
----
After installing Mandrake 6.5 for the first time, I was quickly a Mandrake addict. My body speaks Red Hat, so Mandrake was a welcome addition to my linux CD collection. I find Mandrake to be everything that Red Hat is, plus all the utilities that I would have downloaded anyway. I was a bit thrown off at first by the 7.02 installer, namely the "security level" setting. After a couple re-installs I got my Mandrake system running perfectly. 7.02 is everything that RH 6.1 should have been. No complaints from me.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
yes.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
And we are all very pleased. In fact, if you are just the average Joe out there and show up for a free install, odds are you are getting Mandrake.
I think this is because all of the desktop settings are where you think they should be. Mandrake has a very professional look to it, and the underbelly is looking pretty good too.
I do what the voices on my console tell me to do.
Actually if you read on the mandrake site somewhere(I don't remember where) when the cd boots to the lilo prompt you can type linux text and it will boot into the old text installer like rh6 and before.
Speaking of Upside, Linus and David Ditzel are
on the cover of the April 2000 issue.
In short, the big feature is ease of installation.. but once installed you'd be hard-pressed to tell me it isn't redhat with a different name. :/ This is coming from somebody who has used RH5.2 to 6.1, rawhide, slackware, mandrake 7 (oxygen beta) and mandrake stable. I use it because of the optimizations - compiling takes *forever* from the .src.rpm's.. but the speed difference is appreciable.
That's just my short review of them. I won't comment on LinuxOne other than to say that Mandrake is making an honest attempt to create a new distribution /based/ on redhat, whereas LinuxOne is ripping redhat off.
It's on http://lwn.net/2000/features/LinuxMandrake.phtml
Actually this particular decision is less a matter of following one another than of people changing sides. ;)
I made the decision to split the packages for both of them.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Red Hat Linux 6.2 has a lot of improvements for security; default workstation installations won't start potentially dangerous servers by default, for example. ... packages have been split into client and server packages so people don't have to install possibly dangerous stuff they won't ever need.
Also, the telnet, ftp, tftp,
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Are the big guns watching? What a great example of the positive influence of Open source ideals in the business community. Instead of being viewed as a bad guy for porting Red Hat and calling it his own, Duval is viewed as a partner and as a player in promoting Open Source. What a stretch for big companies like M$, Sun etc for them to actually understand, much less support this methodology. I know they're analyzing the model and are trying to leverage it where they can, but I don't feel it is in the same way that Duval or Lemarois would. The big guns are trying more to exploit the weaknesses of Open Source and GNU rather than participating as a partner. The ones who adopt and support this alternative business model either in part or in full will be the big winners. The sooner they get on board, the better their long term standing will be. Look at IBM and the story that ran yesterday, Open Source, It's not just for geeks anymore.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
You forget that Mandrake (At least 7.0) does come with a range of security levels, which you could shoose from from the installer. When I switched from RedHat 6.0 to Mandrake 7.0, and selected the highest security level, I (And I am not a security professional, I'm just a programmer)noticed several security fixes and things done in another and better way than in RedHat 6.0. Perheaps RH61 is better, I don't know. But Mandrake has done at least partly right when it comes to security.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.