Mandrake Releases 9.1b1, New Packaging Model

DCowern writes "Mandrake today announced version 9.1 of their distribution. While there are some interesting choices for new packages (like kernel 2.4.21pre2 and XFree86 4.3 beta) the most groundbreaking thing about this release is the way in which they decide which packages are "high priority" for development and inclusion in the standard install. Any registered user at MandrakeClub can vote. Their opinion is that no one knows where development effort needs to be spent better than the end-user." Update: 01/10 19:38 GMT by T : That's "distribution."

Comments

Confused?

[ctxspy]

To me, that was a damn confusing summary..

What exactly are they talking about?

Re:Confused?

[mickwd]

"All this is is another way to get more money out of their users."

Download it for free, use it for free. Sounds fair enough to me.

But if you want to have some input as to what actually goes into the distribution, then join the Mandrake Club, which costs money.

Sounds like a great idea as far as I'm concerned, and I wish them luck with it.

I just wish (for their sake) they'd get the Boxed Sets ready earlier (before 90% of their users have already downloaded it for free) - or supply free updates with the boxed sets (maybe slip a "latest updates" CD into packages bought online, installed automatically as part of the installation process), or something else to make them more attractive to buyers. Although it is nice, in a way, to be able to say that supplying extra commercial apps just doesn't cut it anymore (with Star Office being the possible exception) - since the free apps are just too good in comparison.

Although I wouldn't really like to see it, they could also restrict downloading of ISOs to Mandrake Club members only until the boxed sets are ready. But I don't know whether they'd do this - they're pretty committed to the "free"-ness (as in speech) of (Gnu-)Linux.

Re:Confused?

[13Echo]

I like the idea. As a matter of fact, I have even submitted a request for a specific app. Though I don't really actively use Mandrake (I've always been a Slackware fan), I've found some benefits to being a member of the club. This shows that they care about what the users want.

Did anyone else notice something about the Mandrake Club? They've got over 22,000 subscribed members. At $60 per year, per person (basic membership), that is a pretty substantial chunk of income. Undoubtably, they may have some corporate or group memberships, but still; Mandrake Club has proven to be a success, and opportunities like this only help it more.

Re:Confused?

[luisdom]

Although I wouldn't really like to see it, they could also restrict downloading of ISOs to Mandrake Club members only until the boxed sets are ready. But I don't know whether they'd do this - they're pretty committed to the "free"-ness (as in speech) of (Gnu-)Linux

Mmm... I am myself a freeloader, and I wouldn't mind waiting a couple of months more than the paying people. Come on, it is still libre, let the supporting people have some privileges, it is THEM and the developers that make it free for us.
If it makes mandrake survive and improve, two months is better than never.

Re:Misleading

[dnaumov]

There is absolutely, positively NOTHING bad about the RPM. It's all in the tools around it. Have you ever thought what would be so special about *.deb if it wasn't for apt-get ? Right, nothing. And you can have apt-rpm for RedHat.

customer oriented development

[Kunta Kinte]

I'm impressed.

Next thing you know, they'll be making money.

I think these are the innovations that the linux distros need even more than new drivers, other technical advances.

I agree with them

[core plexus]

While it's nice to have an army of hackers working on projects, the fact remains that until the end-user is happy, and I especially mean those who might be interested in switching from Windows or some other proprietary OS, as well as those users who don't care about what their machine is running, just as long as it does what they want it to without having 5 years experience, Linux will be, at best, #2 on the desktop.

Personal Strap-On Aircraft for Auction on eBay A What?

Re:We all need to thank Mandrake

[grub]

Mandrake is now sold pre-loaded on millions of inexpensive, high-quality computers at Wal-Mart

Playing devil's advocate here; I'll venture that most of those machines get reformatted with a warez'd copy of Windows.

Re:a good idea

[Eu4ria]

But if the majority of people make a choice that sort of makes it correct. If 90% of people want gnome and only 10% want KDE, then gnome is the correct choice, that's how democracy works, even if you would choose KDE

Re:Money woes?

[Mr Guy]

Summary of Mandrake's Future, from their perspective.

The line I find most interesting is this one:

The world already boasts of several million Mandrake Linux users, and we know at least 200,000 of you. We could get over this crunch if less than 20,000 users became Silver Members of MandrakeClub.

/sigh

I guess since I run it on my desktop, and finally convinced my wife to run it on her laptop, I should cave and make that 19,999 users.

Millions?

[NetJunkie]

I think not. I doubt millions went to walmart.com and ordered these. Anyone got sales numbers?

Re:We all need to thank Mandrake

[IamNotWitchboy]

Let's not lose our pespective here.

I also think it's a great triumph for mandrakesoft to reach a much wider audience through walmart, but ... millions?

and by the way, solaris is not linux.

Is this a bad time . . .

[Idou]

to remind everyone who has used or is interested in using Mandrake to become a Mandrakeclub member? The Slashdot community has been pretty critical of Mandrake recently, so here is your chance to become a member and do something about the distro you spend so much time bitching about.

Otherwise, people might get the idea that slashdoters are a bunch of whining freeloaders who complain for the very sake of complaining.

Er, or is that me . . .?

Re:We all need to thank Mandrake

[stinky wizzleteats]

Playing devil's advocate here; I'll venture that most of those machines get reformatted with a warez'd copy of Windows.

If I was aware of that happening, I'd turn them in. Not out of Linux zealotry per se, but because I don't want M$ to have a good reason to squash the market for PCs without the M$ tax.

Re:Misleading

[ubernostrum]

Red Hat or any RPM-based distro could never make it that easy; if they did they'd be boycotted for taking away the knee-jerk "Oh it's simple, you just apt-get foo" or "Oh it's simple, you just emerge foo" response from the Debian and gentoo zealots. I mean come on, in some threads that's half the comments on Slashdot; you don't want to wreak that kind of havoc, my friend.

Of course, I like manually installing RPMs; it's really not that much of a hassle for me, and it means I always know exactly what's being installed and why. If there were an automated system, it'd probably just display a progress bar saying "Satisfying Dependencies" and not tell me anything useful, which would be annoying.

beta packages in beta

[Ankh]

Note that there's still approx. 3 months before a scheduled release, so I'd expect the kernel and XFree86 versions to be later.

The package management tools have also been evolving fast -- if you follow the cooker list, you'll know that the gtk+ 2 version of rpmgrake is out, and it's much faster and improved. (and there's an update to urpmi, too).

At this point, urpmi is approaching the usefulness and robustness of apt-get, albeit with slightly fewer features -- e.g. no "suggested other packages". It's possible those willl come later, at least in principle: there's nothing inherent about RPM that prevents such features.

If 9.0 crashed for you, the right thing to do was to report the problems one by one, and help get them fixed for everyone -- not wait 3 months and then whine on slashdot that there were problems. Maybe the Mandrake developers didn't have your hardware. Maybe the XFree86 developers didn't have a machine with your video card, soundcard and disk controller, and couldn't reproduce the problem.

In general I think Mandrake is going in a good direction: making a Linux distribution that's easy to administer and use, but that is powerful enough for experienced users and admins (e.g. distributed package management, command-line configuration possible), has reliable automated package downloading and installation (including dependencies), and yet that uses the standard config files for everything, so that you can still administer it the "old fashioned way" be editing /etc/fstab or whatever... hence, a distributionthat appeals to new users, and also can be used by developers.

Some of Mandrake's tools (e.g. draksync, a graphical front end to rsync that can use ssh) could do with being moved to sourceforge or somewhere and being more widely used.

Having a Linux distribution that most people can install in 20 minutes to an hour, with no difficult questions, makes a big difference. People moving from MS Windows are often used to reinstalling frequently: this way, wen they can't fix a problem, instead of going back to Windows, they go reinstall Linux, until they learn more about reconfiguring and fixing stuff. And if they never learn how to reconfigure, and always reinstall, it's still a win if it doesn't crash, is Free, open, and they can have a say in what packages are available.

Does anyone think a single CD is a bad thing?

[SilentStrike]

I am running Red Hat 8 right now, but I recently installed Mandrake 9 on my 13-year old brother's system (he is running it exclusively, not even dual booting). A few months ago, I put Mandrake 8.2 on my sisters system, which is dual booting with Windows 2000. I am also a member of Mandrake Club.

That said, going with one CD rather than the traditional three isn't really a good thing I believe. If you really wanted Mandrake on one CD previously, just download the first CD. This was already an option, and you could install a reasonably functional system. Surely, they could make sure the the 'highest priority' packages are on the first CD (they have less motivation to do that with the old multi-CD distrobution system, they could afford to let an 'important' package slip to disc 2), which will certainly happen with the new situition, but it's still limiting choices.

Mandrake is basically saying, we are cutting down our distro to 1/3rd the size, pay us to make sure the 2/3 that get cut aren't stuff that you like. It's really not a winning situition for the customer.

I think it would be a much better idea for Mandrake to focus on urpmi. Have networked (RPM, urpmi?... I don't know what they should be called) servers as the default place to look for packages in addition to the installation CDs. They could focus on being like Debian (extreme ease to get new/updated packages after the install), except that the initial Mandrake install doesn't require reading massive amounts of documentation, or much experience with Linux.

Personally, I still like compiling stuff from source, and the only reason I run Mandrake/Red Hat is so I can get an initial working installation... perhaps my I am now competant enough to install Gentoo, and then I won't have to worry about Mandrake anymore anyway.

I'll have to admit..

[zogger]

..I have to admit I don't live in any major urban area nor visit and shop much. I honestly don't know what's on the shelf any longer at any of these various electronics stores. I got a chinamart and a small office supply to look at locally. If lycoris is on the shelf there at Fry's for 20$ that's better than nuthing,it's a good thing, I hope they do well, or maybe decide to merge efforts with another company, which is a better idea, IMO.

Best I can do in an individual effort is to encourage my real world and cyber world friends to try something "new" out, which I already do. Every time they get nailed with the daily virus, they get a polite razz. When people tell me this or that is "too hard", best I can say is to just freeking try getting out of first gear with your computer. I tell them you would at least learn how to hit all the gears on your car, your brane ain't gonna explode to give it the same effort with a computer. You got more than first gear and "engine stop". I know it's a real tough nut to crack, I can see that readily, so all I can say to the various distro guys is hang in there, less releases but better quality,get togerther and see if ya'all can't AT LEAST pick A desktop and some way to update, pick a freeking set of normal apps and make sure they work well,and keep it very reasonable in cost, and do your best to get the pc makers to at least give their customers an option. And if that means to some of the programmers and orgs and companies etc, who contribute code for profit or free, to swallowing some pride and going to help out the closest existing to your point of view major effort instead of "yet another effort-wasting branch" of this or that OS or app, then do it. Just do it. From the outside looking in, there's way, way, way more than enough "distros" and "apps" out there that strive to do the same exact thing. That's about it.

I like the voting model going in the parent article. I'd like to see that concept go to some sort of even higher level, to consolidate some of the branches back into a stronger effort. Maybe that's impossible, I just don't know, but the extremes are that-extremes- one OS and one function app ain't enough, 50 lebenty dozen is "too much". Cooperation is not a cuss word, it actually "works".

Railroads got to be a good deal from standardizing on at least a track size and width.

looking forward to seeing the fonts fixed

[rsilvergun]

Bad fonts turned me away from Mandrake and to Redhat. It's especially bad if you're trying to read Japanese (or chinese I suspect). There were kanji I just couldn't make out (and my Japanese isn't good enough to guess :) ). I really loved Mandrake's config tools though, and I can understand why somebody on older hardware wouldn't want Xft (it lags sometims on my PIII 800/GeForce2mx, I couldn't imagine it on a P 200). I've heard Lindows is going to license some Bitstream fonts. I wouldn't mind RH or Mandrake doing the same (sorry R.M.S., but I'm willing to trade that small bit of freedom for readable fonts that aren't stolen from my windows partition :) ). And I've heard good things from osnews.com about the RH8.1 beta. Mandrake's really laging here, and it's only going to become more important as linux gets more popular (my last tiger direct catalog had a Lindows PC, yeah!).

An alternative business model?

[Pranjal]

Why can't Mandrake give out a basic lite version for free, which for example might not have all the popular apps. They could then put a full featured distro for download or on a CD and give it out to only the paying subscribers of the mandrake club? Or is this not permitted under GPL?