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Newest Mandrake Linux Delayed
Jens Lönn writes: "Linux seller MandrakeSoft has had to delay shipment of its newest version of Linux because of problems in moving manufacturing to the United States. Mandrake Linux 8.1 is available as a download, but the first CDs of the product were supposed to ship by the end of September. "Getting 8.1 production up and running in North America has been a slow and expensive process," the company said in a e-mail message to those who have ordered the CD." Since Mandrake makes certains things so easy (smooth installation), I hope they soon get their newest release again on Walmart shelves across the U.S.
at Adequacy and other outlets? Really, Mandrake can't let their critics get to them.
Very smooth installation...until you mistakingly think the grey colored stars meant selected and format the wrong hard drives :(
There have been lots of troubles all around w/ this MDK release - devfs causing headaches, a kernel level security issue ... maybe a delay could give them time to apply fixes so that the Wal-Mart crowd won't be left wondering, "Just what is this kernel thing anyway ... "
When you buy a CD (music or data) in the UK, nine times out of ten it will have been manufactured in Germany, or somewhere else in Europe. We have import costs very similar to those of the US, yet it's still cheaper for foreign companies (like US-based record labels!) to have their manufacturing offshore - even when they're selling to a completely different country.
I suspect that it's just easier for Mandrakesoft to get someone else organising their North American manufacturing and distribution all at once, rather than managing the supply chain from Europe.
These sigs are more interesting tha
There is always the availability of CDs via Cheap*Bytes
All three CDs (two install and the supplemental) including shipping for $10 US
there are doorways I haven't opened, and windows I've yet to look through. Going forward may not be the answer..
"Who in their right mind would pay for another OS when one came with the system i bought FOR FREE?!"
It's not really a market i see happening. If you MUST have a Mandrake CD at 2am, most likely you can d/l and burn one yourself..
There is no shortage of U.S. firms capable of packaging software and Mandrake's delay in getting their product to market could have dire consequences. The entire Linux distribution market is in a precarious position. Their business model is predicated on most potential customers not having the bandwidth to download multiple CDs, but with cable modems (and DSL connections) finding their way into more and more homes, many people are finding that downloading 1-5 CDs is no big deal. Start it up, wait a few hours or go to bed, burn them the next day.
Add a delay to the availability of a boxed distribution and suddenly people are asking their friends with high-speed connections to download and burn a set of CDs for them. Some that would have paid for a retail copy will now download it themselves rather than wait for it to appear on store shelves.
The only hope that I see for the Linux distro market in the near future is to switch over to DVDs since most people currently lack the capability of burning DVDs from images.
Heinz have had to delay bringing their new type of beans to market, as they are having difficulty getting the cans in time.
Slashdot: So?
s/Heinz/Mandrake/
s/beans/Linux/
s/cans/CDs/
Slashdot: Quick! Hot news!
Hmm. I know how useful sed is, but I never realised it was powerful enough to turn boring tripe into news in just 3 simple commands. Maybe I should read the man more carefully.
... and extra time to fix this distro. I've decided to delay my upgrade until 8.2. Until recently, I was planning on making the upgrade to 8.1. The reports I've read, however, have convinced me to wait. Now that you have the extra time, why not box an 8.1.1?
I believe RedHat have the same problems, since RedHat 7.2 has been ready (even on the mirrors) for some time now, but they will not distibute it (ie. add the everyone-read bit to the file permissions) until they have the CDs ready.
The RedHat 7.2 relase is available trough rsync ....
$ rsync -av csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu::pub/redhat/redhat/lin ux/7.2/en/iso
... done
n ux/7.2/en/iso/i386/MD5SUM .
... done
*** Welcome to the Purdue University Computer Society RSYNC Server
*** Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
http://csociety.ecn.purdue.edu/
This archive is available via FTP, HTTP, and RSYNC at:
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/
http://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/
rsync://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/
Report problems to ftp@csociety.ecn.purdue.edu
receiving file list
dr-x------ 4096 2001/10/05 01:54:02 iso
dr-x------ 4096 2001/10/04 02:01:50 iso/doc
-rw-r--r-- 50 2001/10/04 02:02:00 iso/doc/MD5SUM
-rw-r--r-- 624476160 2001/10/04 00:35:00 iso/doc/enigma-docs.iso
dr-x------ 4096 2001/10/04 02:03:42 iso/i386
-rw-r--r-- 226 2001/10/04 02:04:22 iso/i386/MD5SUM
-rw-r--r-- 680282112 2001/10/04 00:27:19 iso/i386/enigma-SRPMS-disc1.iso
-rw-r--r-- 542537728 2001/10/04 00:29:25 iso/i386/enigma-SRPMS-disc2.iso
-rw-r--r-- 677961728 2001/10/04 00:22:08 iso/i386/enigma-i386-disc1.iso
-rw-r--r-- 669429760 2001/10/04 00:24:42 iso/i386/enigma-i386-disc2.iso
wrote 94 bytes read 691 bytes 314.00 bytes/sec
total size is 3194687764 speedup is 4069665.94
$ rsync -av csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu::pub/redhat/redhat/li
*** Welcome to the Purdue University Computer Society RSYNC Server
*** Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
http://csociety.ecn.purdue.edu/
This archive is available via FTP, HTTP, and RSYNC at:
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/
http://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/
rsync://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/
Report problems to ftp@csociety.ecn.purdue.edu
receiving file list
wrote 106 bytes read 500 bytes 242.40 bytes/sec
total size is 226 speedup is 0.37
$ cat MD5SUM
efab549656a1a85ab8fa39eb873eff0e enigma-SRPMS-disc1.iso
70703897af7703b40e41777a3aa186c3 enigma-SRPMS-disc2.iso
cf7bce0c1cdbfedfae29e60aef202f6f enigma-i386-disc1.iso
fd705b3e5d0e37a828db35d21195a9f6 enigma-i386-disc2.iso
Note that the files are dated 2001/10/04
RFC1925
No doubt, Microsoft is at it again.
Same as with the Mandrake site.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
This seems true, as I recieved my 3-cd set from Mandrake yesterday.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Cheap Bytes (bless their busy little hands) only dl's stuff and burns it, then sells it cheap. Nothing wrong with that, but Mandrake doesn't get a cut, as far as I know. The point of this story is that Mandrake, the orginisation, is having trouble making money because of shippiing problems.
I for one, happen to think it would be a real shame if they went under. Mandrake and Debian are my two favorite distros.
Disclaimer: MINAA (Mummy! I'm Not An Animal!)
European government has a very hostile attitude towards smaller businesses. CE Mark, tax policies, yadda yadda yadda, it all adds up to making it very difficult to start or maintain a small business.
They must be freaking morons at MandrakeSoft. Hey, I use Mandrake, but it's cheap and easy to get a run of CDs with whiz bang labelling, inserts, cases, shipping even large quantities is a breeze, and cheap to boot....
They probably just didn't plan well, or just moved here without any idea how those things run here.
And if you're worried about big brotherish laws in the US, and you're in the UK apparently - well, that makes a lot of sense.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Hopefully 8.1 will work with my laptop.
8.2 is due tomorrow, and 8.3 on Monday.
Seriously...where do these guys find time for quality testing...they seem too busy stuffing the next distro out the door.
Sheesh.
-Ben
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
The U.S. has been and is a great place. However, the crazy legal environment and corporate republic mentality will gradually cause a migration to Europe anyway for pragmatic reasons.
In the EU there is no DMCA, no weird cryptography rules. The EU Commission, as bad as it is, even seems to be handling the Microsoft issues better.
Recruitment will happen. The benefits are much better: lower crime, health care, 5 weeks holiday, free university, pension, and in some countries, clean rivers and lakes.
Also, most European governments (at least the Northern European ones) make it really easy to start small businesses and provide tax major breaks and grants. The larger countries also get pretty good deals. However, the competition between companies in the same branch is often really cuttroat and dictated by who is childhood friends with whom.
For example, regarding privacy, I automaticaly get a written statement of who has requested my credit rating and why.
The other option is to phase in the European standard of living in the U.S. For ex, doesn't California provide free or inexpensive university to its residents?
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
It is now easy to predict that Mandrake will go down as the biggest Linux distro screw up of all time.
(1) Their management is obviously incompetent. This group of French business dum asses handed the most popular (at least by download stats) Linux distro over to a bunch of dot-bomb e-learning idiots here in the States. They later fired that group. Who knows how much money that cost.
(2) Mandrake has to have the worst marketing of all the Linux distros. There is a reason that no big OEMs that Mandrake seriously. This distro has attempted to sell an operating system that people will use to run their businesses while the main Mandrake marketing motif is a drunken looking goofy version of Tux. As for the Mandrake icons and graphics all I can say is it great that Gael Duval's sister has found work.
(3) The Q&A that you see from the older distros like SuSE and RedHat just isn't there. Mandrake 8.1 uses DevFS. While an admirable technical pioneering effort, you just have to look at the Mandrake mailing lists to see that DevFS isn't ready for prime time. It is pretty much a disaster as there are significant hardware configs that DevFS can't handle. Mandrake went from the distro that has the best hardware support to the distro that has the worst. And this is supposed to be a Newbie Linux? 8.1 shipped with a kernel with a VERY broken VM. I have locked up my box many times now as the kernel after taking all 256 megs of swap dies a horrible death.
I installed it, and it wanted to install 1.7 GB of stuff right off the bat. It took me a while to go, one-by-one, down the list to cull enough stuff so that I could actually install on a 1.5 GB partition. Also, it doesn't seem smart enough to tell that, while my root partition might have 1.5 GB, I have designated a /usr partition where much of the stuff Mandrake will install will go.
What happened to the days when you could install a perfectly functional Linux system with X, apache, perl,gcc, etc. in less than 40 MB ?
1) Get quotes and find the right supplier
2) Fill in the credit application form
3) Hit voicemail
4) Get the iso images burned on a CD-R and tested on a few machines to make sure the media is OK
5) Get the artwork in a format that's readable by the film-maker (sorry, gotta use QuarkXpress)
6) Get the artwork to a print bureau and check the output for any errors
7) Get the address where to send all the materials
8) Send them
9) Make sure all they received is okay
10) Hit the voice mail
11) It's weekend, so it will have to wait until monday
12) The CD plant received all the documents
13) They make the film for printing
14) They fax you a copy
15) You approve the copy and send it back
16) They call to ask it you want a white background or leave it silvery. They hit your voicemail
17) You call them back and tell them to leave it silvery
18) They start manufacturing
19) A couple of days later, your CDs are ready, they ship it to you via UPS/Fedex/Whatever
20) You receive them in your warehouse and have to ship thousands of CDs one-by-one
sorry, but i have to disagree -- mandrake 8.1 has TONS of problems related mainly to the new GUI wizards they included for all kinds of setups.
i'm referring here specifically to their "Internet Connection Sharing" wizard (ugh, what's with that Windows nomenclature), which is supposed to setup up proper IP forwarding and some firewalling features, but falls furstratingly flat on its face. the anti-aliased KDE is pretty and obviously they spent lots of time on fluffiness and likeability, but they need to work harder on the tools they came up with.
there's a long way to go in this respect, especially with regard to the inclusion of like fifteen different tools to do the same thing in a *standard* installation, which will surely confuse many of the newbies this product is aimed at.
on mandrakeforum.com the consensus has been that this 'final release' should've been nothing more than an 'RC', since day 2.
peace
-p
A few days ago, I read this review of Mandrake 8.1 which was, to say the least, a bit controversial. After reading some of the comments on the story, I wonder about the accuracy of many things in the article, but you can't deny that it genuinely reflects someone's experience with Linux. It's important to keep up with reviews that AREN'T written by us UNIX gurus, because widespread adoption hinges on the experience new users have with the OS.
Factual or not, this is how new users see the operating system. The harassment that the author of the review received in the wake of writting it will probably drive him away from Open-Source forever and only further reinforce the stereotype of the Linux Community being elitists and jerks. Another story on that site (I can't really figure out the purpose of the site; some of the stuff is really weird) reinforces the same idea: new users like the authors of these two articles are insulted and demeaned for "factual errors" because they're... gasp... new users. The irrational desire for guruism and leetness wins out over the rational desire to encourage and help new users, and ultimately the Linux Community suffers.
Just something to think about.
I personally find Mandrake 8.1 to be a real gem (the X configuration has improved greatly, I love the changes to the package management, and I see little changes here and there that keep making me smile), but if the review reflects the experience that most new users have, maybe it'd make more sense to examine the OS experience rather than flaming the newbies.
My ass.
Maybe compared to the text install of Debian that I tried first, okay, I can accept that. I've been trying to jump the Windows bandwagon for a few weeks now on some test machines, and haven't been terribly lucky with everything going smoothly, not even with Mandrake 8.1.
For instance, if you try to set up an ethernet card using the Control Panel (or whatever it's called), you cannot set up a NIC correctly without using BOTH normal AND expert mode. Reason being, in expert mode, there's no way to set the Gateway and DNS (I think?) servers... you have to go to normal mode to do that, but only if you set up a static IP. If you set up bootp or dhcp, it won't show up those boxes. So once I set those correctly, I went through the expert install and finished off the process. This took some serious tinkering to figure out their severely broken UI, and several hours to sort out because they don't even show you what the settings are unless you get to those screens by pure luck.
If I were the typical clueless Windows user trying Linux for the first time, I'd probably have given up and installed Windows by now.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
devfs is reporting errors on bootup, my primary cdrom (which I booted and installed from) isn't being mounted despite the fstab entries...
Something is unstable in my system and I'm not sure what it is: after a few minutes of running X the video occasionally starts to get corrupted... these things never happened to me in 8.0
I'm going to regress back to 8.0 which was quite simply: solid. I'm simply not knowledgable enough with their distro to be able to troubleshoot the problem. All I can say is that 8.0 was great.
p.s. installed 8.1 fresh from CDs (not an upgrade)... anyways.. for those interested, my system is an Athlon 850 Asus A7V and Matrox G400/SB Live/3COM3c905b/AcerCDRW
Installation CDs burned after doing MD5 checksums on ISOs, and then afterwards on RPMs on CDs.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
The Adequacy.org "review" was satire. I think most of the flames were directed at the clueless MCSE's who sprang up in the discussion...
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
My feeling with the Linux distributions i've seen in stores was, that they always seemed a little dated. I know which kernel is out at the moment, and while in many cases the kernel makes as much a difference as the MHz-Number of your processor when it's between 1400 and 1600, the step from 2.2 to 2.4 was quite large, especially for folks with newer Hardware. Often the kernel-version announced on the package doesn't even tell the whole story, since the mandrake kernels even include many patches which didn't make it into the Linus kernel yet (but have a good chance to get there), but there's only so much you can print on the side of a box and not have it covered in fineprint.
...). With the fast paced and openly visible development in Open Source Software anything three month old already looks slightly dated. So the distributions must frequently issue new versions, and they must get them to the stores as fast as possible (since few people would buy 8.0 knowing 8.1 soon to be out). So when frequently issuing new versions another problem emerges: with the advent of the new version the old CDs drastically loose value, but the new ones need some time from being announced to appearing in the stores.
I think this is quite a problem when selling Linux on CD, since i believe many folks who think about buying Linux in the store at least know the kernel version (but probably don't bother about glibc, gcc,
The folks at Mandrake know all this, their distributions contain all the most recent stuff, their development rpms (cooker) are really cutting edge, and they even offered to sell 8.1 as preview and send the actual CDs when they're out. I run Mandrake and am quite happy with it. I'll probably buy 8.1 just for the manual and being able to install it on some friends computer (and also since i think it's worth the money), since i think Mandrake is a great distribution to start with, and also a good one to stay with, especially if one likes to toy around with the newest stuff (no distro wars please).
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
- find companies that could create the CDs (including labeling or possibly silkscreening),
- get quotes from them (probably at least 3, and possibly a day or two each),
- arrange payment (MandrakeSoft is probably considered a dot-com, and does anyone give credit to dot-coms these days?) and
- probably all sorts of other stuff.
It's the kind of thing that as an individual you could probably do in just a couple days, but even fast companies have more baggage to carry through the whole process.fencepost
just a little off
I'd give 8.1 a try with your laptop.
I have a Sony VAIO which I had a wide variety of problems getting any distro to install correctly on. Mandrake 8 was the first that installed where it was all useable (ie X config OK, sound working, networking working, etc). I had problems getting my wlan card to work under 8, but the installer for 8.1 detected and configured it without a hitch.
I've got 4 machines (including the laptop) running Mandrake 8.1 now. I've been running various flavors of Linux on those same 4 machines for a long time and Mandrake 8.1 is the first I ever remember that installed flawlessly on each of the machines.
As someone who's been using Linux desktops since the days of Red Hat 4, it's pretty incredible to me how far Linux on the desktop has come, especially on laptops.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
This was certainly true back when Mandrake was first formed, but not so much anymore. It's not as if every time Red Hat comes out with a new distro, Mandrake adds their touch and calls it their own. They started with Red Hat but have kinda gone off in their own direction with it, creating something that is, while similar in its roots, very different in its appearance and function.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Unless you're coming to talk about and demonstrate an illegal (in the US) thing you did or sell tons of pirated copies of Windoze and Office, you don't have anything to fear. Yet, at least.
From the Adobe copy protection debacle, it looks like you can be arrested in the US for doing something that's legal where you live, but illegal in the US... this is an interesting precedent.
I'm looking forward to the UK government arresting any US tourists that carry concealed weapons when they are at home in the US.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
2-3 hours downloading and printing out the manuals
I don't know what kind of manuals you've gotten from any off-the-shelf distros lately, but I could download and print everything they supply in about 10 minutes.
But it's all a moot point: I can (and did) download Mandrake Linux 8.1 because no stores have it in stock. I don't think that I'm so out of touch with normalcy that my reaction was unique.
And, as the installations get easier and less problem prone, the need for manuals and support becomes less.
Devfs is causing many people no end of grief, I wonder if Mandrake is going to actually fix a few things while their "production delays" are taken care of. If they don't, I suspect 8.1 is going to be one bumpy ride for them.
So I don't know if I'd say it's satire or what the fuck it is. But it clearly at least acknowledges how ridiculous it is.
http://slashdot.org/articles/980725/117228.shtml
Had to recall that, just for history
If you want to support Mandrakesoft, you'd better order your pack on MandrakeStore. Why? In traditionnal distribution channels, the final reseller (the shop) and the distributor (MacMillan?) take a big margin (traditionnally the two cumulated margins can be as high as 65% of the final price). On MandrakeStore, it seems that MandrakeSoft sells directly to the consumers, so it's very likely that they earn much money through MandrakeStore than from the traditional shelves. My 2 cents.