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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!"
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?"...
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.
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.