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MandrakeSoft's Status Update
joestar writes "MandrakeSoft today posted an update letter from its CEO about the company's health. Among other things, it's interesting to learn that the company seems to be on the good track to go out of the "chapter-11 protection" before the end of the year, that it's taking part to several publicly-funded research projects, and that Mandrake 9.1 is having a good success. They also thank for the warm support they received from the community. Worth a read for all Mandrake fans, like myself. Viva la Mandrake!"
the Magician. Actually, other than the magician himself, who the hell else is named Mandrake?
Hulk - NO! Mandrake - YES!
At the risk of repeating myself...
One of the biggest stumbling blocks to the adoption of Linux on the desktop has been the nerdish nature of the whole installation, configuration and user experience
Ok, I'll bite. I've never installed Windows or Linux. It's always, like, just there (or not). Anyway, as a joint owner of a mainly Open Source based company I thought it was time I tried installing Linux on my home PC (my sysadm's already taken care of my work PC for me, I never touch the config stuff).
So I take three Mandrake 9.1 disks home. Whack them in my CDRom. I had to worry about how much disk space to leave poor old Windows and ignore the "warning, warning, make sure you have backups" prompts. Phew. Spin spin spin everything is installed, even sorted out that it was my external modem that is really used to connect to the internet. When the PC powers on I can chose Windows or Linux - sorry I still need to test our software for Windows users.
Who am I? A user of desktop tools, email, office the internet. A typical office worker who gets techies to help out whenever anything goes wrong. If any one can suggest a replacement for MSProject (clients like the pictures) I'll be off MS completely.
So, its official, as of last week I can confirm that Linux *is* ready for the desktop - go Mandrake and all those Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice, Gimp, Evolution etc etc developers.
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
I've been progressively educating my parents about using Linux, and a few months ago swapped one of their 2 PCs over to Lycoris. My parents didn't really see it as significantly different to Windows, but kept having problems at approximately the same rate as they did under Windows. I knew I wouldn't be faced with the regular 6-9 month full rebuild of the box any more, but the trivial end-user problems kept going at about the same rate.
Two weeks ago, I swapped that same PC over to Mandrake 9.1. It's now become mum's full-time PC, meaning that she doesn't work on the other, Windows PC at all. Dad's now starting to play with Gimp on Mandrake; his most common app is Photoshop on Windows. Dad's now asked me to let him dual boot the Windows PC, so he can run both Windows and Mandrake on it.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the most ringing endorsement possible for Mandrake's useability. While my parents are smart people, they're from a non-PC generation and sometimes struggle with concepts like folders and filenames. For whatever reason, Mandrake, even though it still uses folders and filenames, has let them get beyond the point they were at with Windows, and now I'm getting asked "can I do gamma transforms with Gimp like I do in Photoshop?" rather than "where's my file gone?"...
Well personally, I'm not going to pay for a site I've never read before, and am unlikely to read again. If I had to pay $5/month for every site I read, well, there wouldn't be many. There's only so much money in a paycheck.
And anything that's "Weekly" is likely to be about as timely as my local newspaper. I stopped buying that on January 1, 2000.
Of course if you had simply put a "Paid Subscription Required" disclaimer on your link, you wouldn't have met with any comments to this effect, I'll wager.
No one likes clicking a link and getting "subscription required" when they don't expect it. Even if it's free. I've blocked the new york times' website at my router, and replaced it with a "sorry, the owners of this domain are smoking crack. Try a news source that hires reporters instead of Contemporary Fiction Authors." (I added the second part after the recent fiasco.)
If you're publishing on the web and can't make ends meet without requiring a paid subscription, you probably shouldn't be publishing.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Not even any vendors on PriceGrabber.com have 9.1 for sale
So the only people in the US using Mandrake are freeloaders downloading iso's, with a fraction of those joining Mandrake Club.
If Mandrake wants to survive, they have to find a way to revive their US channel sales.
Mandrake is the best distribution for those who want to make a transition to Linux. Even if they're not really profitable, there will always be a niche.
It's just like AOL. It's turned a lot of people on to the 'internet' (or at least something like it). You don't start people who have no idea about the internet out with a shell account. Same goes for Linux -- if someone who is comfortable in Windows who knows enough to know the difference, then give them a copy of Mandrake -- don't start them out with Debian or gentoo. Therefore, I think that Mandrake will be around for a long time -- as long as there are people who want to learn how to use Linux.
Both SUSE and Mandrake make it easy to install illegal video software, for your viewing and DVD ripping pleasure. All binary rpms with all dependencies solved!
The French Mandrake users have the Penguin Liberation front whereas the German SuSE users have the packman website, all full with libraries and compiled video programs. MPAA must be sleeping, they DO NOT DO ANYTHING
Mandrake should grab the bull by the horns and give Linux users what they really want: a distribution that can deftly handle any media type and play big-name games. Adding a boss commercial game and WineX in a pre-configured way ala Sims will encourage people to throw down much needed ching instead of just freeloading (I meant downloading) and may even persuade Redhat users who are bored out of their skulls to switch. The game CivIII makes a good candidate in my mind because the hardware requirements aren't outrageous and the game is addictive as hell.
Also, get rid of all the crufty useless mediaplayers that don't work and replace with one of two that will work. I'll say Quicktime4Linux or RealPlayer with all the codecs so it's ready to play any media format right out of the box. In fact, strip down alot of the unnecessary apps that litter my main menu. More isn't always better.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
As a Silver member living IN the U.S., I must say I disagree about the importance of Channel Sales for Free software. There are currently more than 15,000 paying members supporting Mandrake. I don't consider myself a non-freeloader, but someone with enough invested in the distro that it is worth me paying some $ in order to have some say in what direction it goes. Also, club member get great support from other members and VIP members (usually developers). This gives me a valuable advantage in my profession.
/. mentality is when a post claiming that Channel Sales are the key to survival gets modded up. Let me guess, /. will never be successful until it is sold at Bestbuy, and I am a moron for subscribing to it. I am amazed you people are even able to connect to the internet . . . oh yeah, AOL. . .
I don't think channel sales have the kind of profit margins club memberships have, so why bother? I don't care if 99% of the users are freeloading, as long as there are enough "power-users" to support the distro, and it looks like we are coming up on that number nicely.
Anyway, it shows a lot where the
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
But this is Free Software, and if Mandrake falls, someone else can take it up. So far,a lot of user-friendliness work has been done by for-profits. There's no reason this has to be the case. If Mandrake fails, is there anyone planning to start where they left off? Are there people ready to work on this?
I'll put in as much time I can.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
I've been using Mandrake 9.1 to finally land some Linux boxes at work, among the throngs of Windows and Sun/Solaris machines.
Half of the machines are for telecom network monitoring purposes and will have 6 to 8 displays apiece (using Xinerama and a combination of Nvidia and Matrox video cards.) These will let us retire Windows NT and the Exceed X server.
The other half of the machines are rack mount servers running LAMP and stand alone perl apps. These will let us retire some Solaris/Sun boxes.
After developing TCP/IP serving applications in perl on Solaris for years, it's nice, real nice, to see them run at previously unheard of speeds on a cheap P4 box with a gig of 533mhz RAM. The performance lays waste to our Solaris servers.
Mandrake 9.1 was an easy way to pull it off. It has detected all hardware we've used and all the built in peripherals on some new Intel motherboards flawlessly.
My only headache so far was trying to run quad-heads off an matrox AGP 550 and a PCI 450. It does not work. Keeping the dual head 550 and adding SIX Nvidia TNT2 cards allowed us to flawlessly run eight monitors. Thats what we'll be doing.
and I LOVE it compared to M$..
.0's (dot-ohs) .0's ALWAYS suck. ALWAYS.
It's just good stuff.
I started on 8.2 and just about the time I got it good and screwed up 9.0 came out. Well, that sucked pretty much, so much that I tried to switch to suse 8.1 Suse 8.1 had some problem with my mobo so I went back to 9.0
A few weeks later 9.1 was out and since then it's been great.
I've put several friends and family members on it and they like it too. And they went cold turkey from M$ to Linux. They are still and always will be lost, but they were anyway. Better to be lost on the same island as your support guy though eh??
I had to learn and old lesson that I had forgotten from the DOS days. Stay away from
As far as I'm concerned, I think I'll stay with Mandrake 9.1 even if they do come out with 9.2 or 9.3 or 10.0...
I don't want M$ compatibility in my Linux. I do not want it. Please, please don't push it in on us, don't force it on us, don't sneak it in on us. We want absolute freedom from the tyranny of M$...
Thank you Mandrake..
Transgaming is about a millionth of a percent more important to me than Mandrake. I don't purchase anything from Mandrake, either. Welcome to the free market.
Put your money where your mouth is, you dont pay for Slashdot, you dont pay for Mandrake, and you arent subscribed to Transgaming?
No, it's called a purchase in most cases. Donations are different, because you don't get anything in return. This is why I said if you can get something for your money, do it. Otherwise, don't. Do it because you are purchasing something, not because it's a doomed or successful company.
The proper term is "investment". For an English major you sure dont know the definition of the words you choose to use even if you spell them properly and/or have mastered the use of the spellcheck program in your OfficeXP ware.
Investments are money given in advance in the hopes that a company will give returns. A purchase is buying a product or license, you purchase software from Microsoft, you invest in the stock market.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac