Why Mandrake is Too Cool for UnitedLinux

An anonymous reader says "Mandrake's lastest community (spam) newsletter contains their explanation as to why they won't join in on UnitedLinux. Besides the obvious geek-fun of rolling their own distro, they claim that the underlying idea of UnitedLinux is based on a flawed comparison to the Unix world of the 80's. " I think the whole UnitedLinux thing is lame- the distros that want to be compatible already are. UL is just the 2nd tier distros trying to get attention and ink away from the "evil forces" in North Carolina. I'll just stick to the best distribution and watch the fun from afar ;)

Comments

Re:UnitedLinux is not the solution

[Strog]

Have you tried urpmi on your Mandrake box?

It's the backend for the graphical software manager. Automatically downloads dependancies etc. similar to apt-get(I said similar, not like apt-get). I like typing partial package names and it will give you a list of all matches, versions, etc. Works fine out of the box but you really need to add mirrors for updates and cooker if you want to really work well.

Urpmi has had some teething problems in the past but works well now on my systems. Anyone working with it on the 8.0 PPC release will know what I'm talking about. The issues basically convinced me to run the development version (cooker) on this iMac until the bugs were worked out. Worked much better when I got the latest wget. Curl didn't really help the issues for me. The last couple releases have worked flawlessly for me. That has me looking for problems that may or may not be there. YMMV

I'm not knocking apt-get. I've used it and thinks it works great. I also like the package management in FreeBSD too. I think more Distos/OSes can look at what's been done and follow these examples.

Re:they dont hack libc libm or anything important

[LinuxGeek8]

yeah great
lets see them actually use gcc3.1 before redhat

Nice flamebait.
They are already using gcc 3.1 in Mandrake Cooker, their development distro.
They built everything with it short after the release of 8.2. They tried before, with Mandrake's rpm-rebuilder robot, but a lot of software didn't build with gcc 3.0 then.
With gcc 3.1 and 3.1.1 things look better.

They were the first with devfs in mdk 8.0 I believe, allthough that might have been a bit early.
They were the second distro to use apt-get (after Connectiva), but they switched to their own tool, urpmi, which is working rather good nowadays (apt-get for rpm isn't perfect yet too, you know).
So all in all, it seems to me you put out a rather cheap flamebait; you mostly lack the right information.