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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.
So what do you want from Mandrake? That they differentiate themselves as much as possible from RedHat and produce something completely incompatible? What a waste of time! I'm intalling Mandrake from now on, and I've found that I can even just install its RPMs on top of a stock RedHat install without problem. Mandrake is also often more up to date than RedHat, which is quite useful. RedHat's RPM sometimes lag by months or more compared to the source releases.
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, as it reacts weirdly (if you hit return sometimes the GUI logic makes it so that what you have just typed gets cancelled, I don't remember how this happens this bites me everytime I install RedHat). Mandrake's DiskDrake is very good in terms of user interface, it offers sane default entries for mount points for example (/home, /var, /usr etc ...), it labels the DOS partitions automagically, it shows the disk partitioning graphically AND interactively (read: you can click on a partition to edit it). It seems to be hard to fuck something up by mistake because the warnings make sense and don't just pop up all the time. You are allowed to change your mind and roll back at any time.
Also their install handles very well non-linear situations (you can skip a few steps and then come back and forth w/o problem).
It's not perfect still. The package selection management, even though it's fairly functional, gets really painful to use when in expert mode and it lists thousands of package. Esp. since the package hierarchy does not make sense.
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.
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.
BTW, capitalists are not necessarily free marketers. And not all free marketers are capitalists. Those who are hard core free market types already know that open source is *one* of several classic free markets. They also know that it is not the only one.
The essence of free markets is voluntary interactions. If you can keep the open source community voluntary, we will have no problems.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
It's on http://lwn.net/2000/features/LinuxMandrake.phtml
If we're so antagonistic about KDE, why are we providing daily builds of KDE 2.0 RPMs?
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Re-read the article.
They're talking about the initial version, when Red Hat Linux was using fvwm because of Qt license issues (and before GNOME was started).
Making any of these claims today is ridiculous of course, back then they were valid.
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They're still around - I've received a free sample copy of LinuxOne OS 1.3 a couple of days ago.
It's ridiculous though - looks like their current version took Mandrake 6.0 (not even 6.1), renamed the package (rpm -qpi shows a -mdk release, the filename doesn't), removed Red Hat's copyrights from the installer (something we aren't welcoming - not even the GPL permits you the code change printf("(c) Red Hat"); to printf("(c) LinuxOne");), added 4 more packages, dropped in a newer kernel (simply removing patches that didn't apply anymore without adapting them), and released it as an all new distribution.
They're also including LinuxMac, a proprietary frontend to fdformat, mkdosfs and mkmacfs they wrote - something I could rewrite from scratch in maybe an hour. Guess they call it adding value.
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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.
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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,
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The only problem Red Hat has ever had with KDE was the Qt 1.x license.
With Qt 2.x, this is hardly an argument since we don't write proprietary code.
If you take a look at the current 6.2 beta, you'll notice the "KDE Workstation" setup now actually installs KDE as the default desktop. It still installs gtk and gnome-libs; this is intentional because it makes sense to have both libraries around (it's not a problem to run GNOME applications in KDE and vice versa).
The 6.1 package actually has a KDE logo on its back side.
The default setting is purely a matter of taste (both defaults are ok as long as a user can change them...); there are arguments for both, and the default setting may or may not change some time in the future - it depends on how the desktops continue to develop.
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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.
Don't say that. The world's most popular distribution supports both, and that will not change anytime soon.
KDE and GNOME each have their own set of advantages and disadvantages, and unless one of them really manages to catch up with the others (and provides compatibility), there's definitely good reason to have both.
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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.