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Mandrake Linux... Not Dead Yet?
bloodeu writes "Mandrake Linux has been beaten down by linux experts alike, but this new release of Mandrake may hold many promising Linux users
what they have been waiting for, like NTFS resizing(which is a first), Automatic Network config(zeroconf), Supermount, and
many more. You can download the Mandrake 9.1 RC1 Here"
So we can all go download it and not pay them a cent.
uhhhhmmmmmm
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
I tried it (9.0) for a few weeks and the only thing I didn't like was that wine wasn't installed/configured like in RedHat (7.3). Is this another case of some linux people hating a distro because it's too easy to use?
It's worth pointing out to anyone thinking of installing this as their main OS that this is an initial release candidate and is nowhere near prime time.. be warned unless you want to find and report bugs.
Mandrake Linux has been beaten down by linux experts alike
Ok. I'm a Linux, more specifically a Unix "expert" and I can see nothing wrong with Mandrake:
A easy to install, easy to use, full featured Linux desktop? How horrible! Oh the humanity! When will it stop!
It's not like Mandrake Linux pissed in my Wheeties this morning.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Even if you don't use Mandrake, you've probably benefited from the work they've put into "making the Linux desktop user friendly."
:) [And I could be wrong -- perhaps they also had Red Hat, dunno.]
(That's a category I'm in right now: I don't currently have any systems running Mandrake, but for about three years running -- until about a month ago -- I did.)
- Mandrake concentrates on ease of install. Not that everyone's intuition is actually the same, goes the past-the-nipple argument, but Hey, Mandrake 6 did a lot better job with *my* intuition (and hardware) than did any of the contemporaries I can remember putting on.
- Automount. Yes, it's come and gone strangely (back now?), but Automount is a very good thing. Try explaining to a Mac user the procedure of mounting a CD drive, or a simple %$#@ USB memory key thing.
- Mandrake (afaik) was the first and so far only Linux distro to be sold as a standalone product in Walmart, and I bought several versions there (as the king of Swamp Castle says "... just to show 'em!"). Software specifics aside, this is another good reason to be grateful to Mandrake, whether you use their distro or not. Lindows was *not* the first Walmart-associated Linux
Mandrake started to fade off my systems when I discovered how nice Red Hat 8 is, and then when I used Knoppix to convert some machines to Debian. (And since I need to reduce the number of machines floating around here, there are fewer computers with which I care to purely experiment.) However, I plan to try the 9.1 release candidate to see where it falls.
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
"promising Linux users what they have been waiting for, like NTFS resizing(which is a first), Automatic Network config(zeroconf), Supermount,"
How much does it really matter that they have all this? They don't make any money, thats their problem!
Disclaimer, I moved to FBSD for 'server land' a while ago, due to the progressively fragmenting Linux desktop community..
Wait a sec. You changed what you used as a server based on the fragmenting desktop? I don't get that. Why change servers if the desktop situation is wierd?
Just like Loki software is dead, no more games, the entire "linux game industry" collapsed when loki went away. All those great developers disappeared off the face of the earth never to think about a penguin again. Dan Vogel (the Really Smart Guy who ported UT to OpenGl) just disappeared, oh yeah except he ported UT2003 to OpenGL and got a Linux installer on the retail media. Loki is all gone, they've gone to the great icculus.org in the sky.
Yes Mandrake is dead, the IT (Ironed Tee shirts) pissed off all the money and Mandrake is dead. Oh, there's still that 10-12 guys who put together the release candidates, and the betas. The guys who are busting their humps as we speak to put together the hippest easiest bestest distro ever to be released. Yes it's dead, RedHat 8.0 just cleaned it out. Nobody needs Little Mandrake anymore, nobody ever cared about DRI working immediately after installation, and EVERYONE is listening to ogg media instead of MP3's. Sure Mandrake is dead, nobody even cared that Redhat 8.0's kernel didn't work right with WineX.
Dead dead dead, nobody needs an easy to use, easy to install, distro which can be installed on a computer with XP pre-installed without having to destroy the XP partition.
Everyone is pure, everyone runs Pure Linux, nobody needs games, nobody dual-boots, nobody is a noob, nobody needs to RTFM.
I renewed my Mandrake membership last week, did you?
I hope MandrakeSoft stays alive, simply because they seem to be the only major distro that "get's it" in the Linux community. They have consistently been pushing to make Linux easier to install and use, without browbeating newcomers into a "it must be bad if it's easy" mentality. I applaud them for it.
Mandrake is the ONLY good thing ever to come from France.
Considering how big of an American tourist trap this is, I'm sure there are a number of Americans who'll say that there is a few more things they cherish that came from France.
Where's the US Army to rescue this group of dying frenchmen?
I find it odd that Americans are all so willing to insult France for being defeated by one of the most powerful armies in modern time, but are now all upset when they don't want to aid an attack on a small, middle-eastern country who has shown no signs of a direct threat.
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
Ah, how quickly we forget where the Statue of Liberty comes from, which way it faces, and *why?*
Oddly enough the American armies who "saved" France did. That's one of the reasons they were there in the first place, to honor a debt that was defaulted in fact and unrepayable in philosophy.
I live in upstate NY, just a couple blocks from the occasional local residence of a young French gentleman whom both Pershing and Patton are reputed to have payed homage to when first setting foot on French Soil.
LaFayette, we are here, and some of us haven't forgotten.
And don't forget the old saying, 60 million Frenchman can't be wrong. Hell, maybe when they became "Cheese eating surrender monkeys" it's simply because they knew something we didn't.
Go figure.
As for Mandrake. Good distro in its way. If the company deserves to live it just might pull it off. If it doesn't well, millions of Frenchman have died while singing La Marseillaise rather than surrender.
Did you know that proper protocol for handling a French flag is that once it's raised it is never taken down again until reduced to rags? Think about it.
KFG
Are you by any chance a member of the MandrakeClub? I, for one, am. How about doing something tangible instead of sending best wishes and speaking out about how it should be kept alive?
Open source is a great concept but it cannot work if everybody takes for granted that it's all free as in free beer. After all, 5$ a month is not that much a donation, given the fact that you get a great OS for it.
Just a thought.
The beauty of Knoppix is obviously its automagic hardware configuration. Well, you know what that is? It's HardDrake, Mandrake's hardware recognition tool. That's the magic of Mandrake, and the common sense of Klaud Knopper, to tack it onto Debian.
put the what in the where?
Was just clarifying that im not as much into the linux community, so that my statement was based on older info.. that things could have changed somewhat..
Due to the fragmentation in the linux community i changed to FBSD for servers, yes. Cant have a community like that when it comes to the back room.
I have stayed on linux for desktop, but at this rate that may change too..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Another thing worth pointing out about NTFS is that Mandrake is not the first Linux distribution with NTFS resizing support. Xandros had it when they announced their first official release a few months ago. I suspect that they used the same code as Mandrake, though I don't know. Xandros's PR pages claim that they were the first with that capability.
I have no idea who to believe, and frankly I don't care who got their first; I'm just glad it's implemented. Now, if we could just get decent NTFS write support, we'd be in much better shape. Being able to read/write your Windows partition from Linux makes dual-booting much more tolerable. On at least one occasion, being able to write a FAT32 partition from Linux has saved my butt. (Windows was refusing to boot because some vital configuration files had gotten corrupted; I couldn't boot from floppy 'cause my disk drive was dead, but I was able to replace them from Linux -- disaster averted!)
Not being able to do similar things with NTFS partitions is a significant drawback which may be discouraging some people from trying Linux out on their shiny new 2K/XP machine. I hope it gets worked out in the not-too-distant future.
Let me get this straight...you consider a "free ride" like the ability to go from Windows to Linux frustrating? You want people to be "self-sufficient" and "figure things out for themselves?" In other words, you want them to take time out of their days learning to use their system in order to be productive, when they could be using that valuable time to actually BE productive?
If everyone operated like this, then there would be very little time wasted explaining the documented solutions to common problems, which would free everyone up to concentrate on the real problems, in order to make progress.
Instead of this ass-backwards view, how about developers get around to FIXING those common problems, so they don't need to be explained? Expecting people to make tinkering with their OS a hobby in order to use it--lest they get a "free ride"--is ridiculous to me. It reaks of the "smug feeling of superiority" you say isn't so prevalent. Linux being difficult to set up isn't a fault of the users. I am so tired of people who imply such. Some out there need to spend some time away from their command prompt and Emacs sessions and interact with the rest of the world and see how they use computers. Otherwise, Linux will forever remain just a nice file and web server.
Sorry for the frustrated tone...I just want Linux to succeed, and I see so many attitudes holding it back.
Neither Xandros nor Mandrake was the first to support NTFS resizing during installation. It was ASPLinux almost two years ago. For more details see the beforehand mentioned ntfsresize web page.
But Mandrake *is* the first who provide an easy to use free solution. Free both in the sense as "free beer" (no need to pay as for Xandros) and "free speech" (complete source code available, not for Xandros or ASPLinux). These additional values provided by Mandrake, and Linux-NTFS team of course, make a big difference for users benefit.
And Open For Business (unusual for Tim Butler to make this kind of blue, but...)
Gael Duval made the mistake of comparing the "bankruptcy protection" that Mandrake is under with a US Chapter 11. They are completely different. The idea in the US is that at this point the vultures gather and peck the unfortunate company to death (although when this happens to Microsoft I expect a number of uncultured louts to be gathered around EULA bonfires wearing party hats and making toasts with MSDN CDs); in France, the idea is that the company is repaired and gets a chance to catch its breath. The French government has approved Mandrake's plan for doing so.
It's worth reiterating that Mandrake are making a profit, but they've got some financial baggage from the halcyon dot-com days when a bright-eyed bushy-tailed and basically dumb management team spent too much money chasing non-core-business dreams.
I personally don't like some of the things Gael has done, but Mandrake as a whole is enthusiastic and productive. They're helping efforts like KDE enormously as well, and unlike certain other noisy for-profits who run everything as root, Mandrake GPL everything they do and actually publish the sources. They about as close to Debian as an RPM-based for-profit corp can be, and with a much more obvious concern for usability.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I have no idea who to believe, and frankly I don't care who got their first
FYI... off topic...
In about 1982, PC World magazine says, on the front cover, that MS-DOS 2.0 is the first operating system with a hierarchical file system.
The first in a long list of Microsoft innovations.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.