Mandrake Clarifies its Future

fabiolrs writes "Mandrake Linux has an article in response to the message they sent on march 11th. They claim that because of user help they are "cash-flow positive"! That is great news since Linux community is now sure it will continue using one of the nicest distros available!"

Comments

Awesome

[mckeowbc]

I love Mandrake. It's ease of use, and painless install are the only reasons that I have been able to convert my girlfriend, her roomate, and one of her college suitemates to Linux. It's config tools are nice and easy to understand. And it comes bundled with software that people actually want. It was also my first distro. But now I'm on to Debian. Ahh...memories. Long live Drake!

Cash flow positive...

[fruey]

...does not mean profitable.

Great news anyway though, true Linux hackers may never install Mandrake, they'll have their own build. But a friendly install, etc (Mandrake is good on this point) has to cost time and effort from hackers who would perhaps rather be doing something else.

Still, I won't be in Mandrake club :)

Re:Cash flow positive...

[bhsx]

From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) :

Mandrake \Man"drake\, n. [AS. mandragora, L. mandragoras, fr.
Gr. ?: cf. F. mandragore.]
1. (Bot.) A low plant ({Mandragora officinarum) of the
Nightshade family, having a fleshy root, often forked, and
supposed to resemble a man. It was therefore supposed to
have animal life, and to cry out when pulled up. All parts
of the plant are strongly narcotic. It is found in the
Mediterranean region.

And shrieks like mandrakes, torn out of the earth,
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad. --Shak.

Note: The mandrake of Scripture was perhaps the same plant,
but proof is wanting.

I like the 'often forked' line, as I'm planning my own.

Re:Cash flow positive...

[pivo]

can anyone articulate what a "Madrake" is?

Yes it's a Mediterranean herb (Mandragora officinarum) of the nightshade family with ovate leaves, yellowish or purple flowers, and a large forked root traditionally credited with human attributes b : the root of a mandrake formerly used especially to promote conception, as a cathartic, or as a narcotic and soporific

Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root
Donne

Re:Cash flow positive...

[blab]

I believe that Mandrake's financial forcasts show them reaching profitability this fall...

This was a short-term cash crunch which is not the same as losing money.

As seen in last weeks SlashBack

[Havokmon]

Right Here I was wondering why that didn't make the Front Page

Best Buy

[asv108]

Well every Best Buy has mandrake boxes, plus a few other distros, and they are a nationwide chain.

Problem with Mandrake Club

[jacobb]

I love mandrake, and have bought a couple boxed sets, because unlike a couple previous replies, I think that its work getting linux on the desktop is highly important.

The only problem with their club is that you must pay for an entire year at a time. The least you can pay is $60.... Now, I'm not too rich at all, but I really wouldn't mind paying $5 a month even if it was autobilled. I'd even pay $6 a month - the extra buck to cover extra credit card fees that they'd have.

Bottom line: I can afford $5 /mo but not $60 /year

They've lost me...

[Otter]

I was generally pleased when I tried out Mandrake 8.0. even if some of the "user-friendly" features got in my way more than they helped. I was hopeful about 8.1, but it turned out to be a headache, breaking supermount and giving me trouble with the development tools. I switched back to 8.0.

8.2 has been even a bigger pain in the ass for me. The update crashed during package installation forcing me to reinstall. Audio CD playback doesn't work, on a basic ATAPI drive. (Yes, sound does work.) Finally, when I decided to try Tuxracer, it or the dependant packages that came with it hosed X.

Yes, given time I could fix this stuff but I'm not going to. I'm downloading Skipjack ISOs instead and I'll go back to Red Hat if that works out.

(Once again, I gave Debian a try with no luck. I realize _someone_ gets it installed, but we're talking about a pretty vanilla system here - year and a half old Athlon/VIA/NVIDIA. I mean, I have code in that distro -- I should be able to install the damn thing.)

Here's their response to me

[jacobb]

yeah, I wrote them a nice long email laying out my situation, and I told them that they'd most probably multiply significantly the number of subscriptions if they let you pay monthly.... they replied saying that they might work on it in the future :(. here's part of the email:

When we will be able to do it technically we will do it. For the moment
it need bit more time.
There is also the problem that we are going to offer more and more
attractive stuff and don't want someone to pay for one month, grab
everything and stop.

Re:Great project, great company!

[joestar]

I think your question makes sense. However the Mandrake Club is about providing privileges to its users. The first "privilege" is to support Mandrake Free-Software developments, which has great consequences (the more you give the Mandrake Club, the more they can put ressources in development/QA/Free Software support such as KOffice, Linux kernel...). The second privilege is about software people use and are interested in, but which aren't available as Free-Software yet. I'm personally against proprietary software, but I've downloaded StarOffice 6.0 final from the Club, as well as Mozilla plugins packaged for Mandrake (Real player 8.0, Flash player...). In this sense, this is a privilege, because I would have passed time to find and download those pieces of software anyway. With the Club, I just downloaded them and now I'm using them. Other privileges include some interesting talks with MandrakeSoft founders and Mandrake developers. But other privileges are yet to come! The Club is very young and is growing depending on users needs/requets... It's a nice interface between us - the Mandrake users - and the Mandrake Linux project.

Cringely LIES

[JM]

That is a pure lie. I handle all transactions on the Mandrakestore, and we answer *all* requests.

Before we take the credit card, we log the transaction into an SQL database. Then it's passed to the bank, where they enter their credit card number. The bank keeps the transaction into their database. Then, the bank returns the data to us (without the card number), we log it again, and we send an e-mail to the customer with their receipt number, and a copy to me, stored on an offline server.

We can't possibly lose the information, unless the customer entered a bunch of "asajkd" and "adasdkj" into the fields, didn't print his invoice, and his e-mail bounced, and even then, we can ask the bank to find the info if the customer used a valid credit card number.

I'm e-mailing the guy right now.

Re:Great project, great company!

[Afrosheen]

Where's the humor in this, oh crack smoking moderators with a +5 funny rating? This is serious. I use mdk8.2 on more than a few servers. From stability to security Mandrake has it down.

Know any other desktop-friendly distros that don't want you to be root in a window manager or don't install telnet server by default because it's a security risk?

Re:Distro question.

[Afrosheen]

Mandrake advantages:

Easy installation on a wide variety of machines, support for alot of newer hardware as well as old machines.

Many filesystems to choose from.

Good desktop integration. Apps span all desktops so if you use Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, Blackbox, or whatever, you always have the same menu synced up so all your apps are a click away.

Nice pentium optimizations for all packages. Redhat is stuck on i386 packages while mandrake has been i586 for years. This results in a 10-50% speed increase depending on the app, including the Advanced Extranet version of Apache, an excellent server that Mandrake ships with.

Mandrake tries to keep newbies from making stupid mistakes. You have to install rpms as root. KDE has a red desktop and almost no icons if you login as root. This discourages newbies from using a root desktop where it's easy to do lots of damage. Telnet server is not installed by default, you have to urpmi telnet to get it to install. That's good for security, and ssh is a default part of the install if you pick the server packages.

Fully customizable install. You can have a system install anywhere from 85 megs all the way to 2+ gigs. It depends on what you want. Also the installer knows what rpms depend on others so if you choose to remove packages from the install list it'll tell you what other packages depend on it so you won't end up with a broken system on your first install.

Up to date libraries and programs. Mandrake has been on the bleeding-edge as far as this goes for years. While some other distros are a pain in the ass to get the newest whatever running on, usually with Mandrake it's easy since all the libs are new.

Easy to update DURING INSTALL or post-install. During the install if you choose a mirror it'll hit the internet and get new packages for you. This was a brilliant move for mandrake because as bugs are found and squashed in 8.2, they can be added to this update list. Showstoppers can be squashed before you even boot into your fresh mandrake install for the first time. Post install updating is even easier, just open rpmdrake and click mandrake update. That's all it takes.

There are tons of more benefits but these are really the ones that shine IMHO.