Slashdot Mirror
MandrakeSoft Improves Financial Health
joestar writes "MandrakeSoft's latest financial results have been posted to their website. Despite a slight decrease in revenues - mostly due to the dollar/euro rate and negative effects of the Chapter 11-like protection - first results seem impressive: "the company reduced operational expenses by a factor of 5, increased gross margins by a factor of 5 and reduced its losses by a factor of 7". As a result, MandrakeSoft has been cash-flow positive since January 2003, and expects its first positive result for the current quarter! Along with latest Mandrake Linux cool products, these are excellent news in my opinion because it shows that an appropriate business model can help Linux companies greatly."
Knoppix ...- usb/
http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix
Now mandrake move looks a cool idea in storing all the files on the move however what would be even better is a system which boots from a USB device. Now that would be cool
Can't we do that already? I believe most recent motherboards have a BIOS that allows booting from USB. Mine does. Haven't tried it though.
bp
Have a look at this page;
In November 2001, MandrakeSoft introduced MandrakeClub -- a new concept of offering special services and benefits to Club members which also helps the distribution stay true to the Open Source spirit.
They filed for chapter 11 this year. That means they have been asking for donations through the club for two years before they started having real financial troubles.
Well... MandrakeMove's concept is to offer a liveCD with a USB key that automatically stores configuration data and personal data (email...). That's slightly different... Additionally, MandrakeMove is... a Mandrake :-)
I think that I moved to Mandrake at release 7.2 - RedHat was starting to look too much proprietary to me, something that recent news have confirmed.
Mandrake does include bleeding edge software, but normally it's mostly optional - you can run a real stable server system if you want to with it. I have used Mandrake as both my standard desktop (both in my computer and my wife's notebook). never got any HW detection problems. Recently I bought an USB Ethernet adapter. Just plugged it into wife's notebook USB port, it started to work. No hassles at all. Period.
Also, Mandrake is my Firewall Solution for years now, as Mandrake was the only distribution that allowed me to use my old Performa 6360 as a firewall.
If this is not important to you, or if you suggest me to use NetBSD for PPC instead, forget it. The 6360 has no video/kdb console accessible and so I had to use the serial console directly - which had instability problems and became completed frozen up from hour to hour.
"But you can connect from the network!"
Nope. The network driver couldn't contact my little ethernet network, and locked up the entire machine. And I don't use RealCrap cards in this server, but an ANA-6922TX card.
So, I,ve tried Mandrake as Yellow Dog didn't install; LinuxPPC was fine but had a pretty outdated selection of packages. I'm glad I've done this.
Now, if I just could find one or two 32 MB memory DIMMs for the Performa to replace my two 16 MB DIMMs...
--------
Fighting the herd since 1985.
If you find yourself looking for Mandrake rpm's all the time, searching forums with the keyword Mandrake often enough, or want to join a productive and growing community, consider joining MandrakeClub.
You are supporting Mandrake (the developers, company, and distribution) through MandrakeClub. There are several benefits that are nice to have (select mirrors, a huge archive of Mandrake rpms, and bittorrents for ISO's) not to mention the fact that you are supporting an operating systems designed with you in mind. There are even forums for different languages. This is a volunteer community by-and-large. No one was forced to come because they found Mandrake preloaded on their computer.
You pay for one year, with 4 levels of subscription. A silver subscription gets you most everything you want for $120/year. Remember, you are not just supporting a corporation. You are supporting a free product (development, patching, documentation, and web hosting) which brings free software that much closer to everyone (including you).
I do not work for Mandrake. Look at the options yourself. And remember Linux and Mandrake are not free because they don't cost anything - they are free because they are supported by people who believe they should be free.
RPM hell? When was the last time you used mandrake? You do know that you have to configure urpmi so that it can download latest software from mirrors, which by the way can easily be found on this site:
Easy Urpmi
Subscription service is a value added service for club members. There you can get the latest test software and then club members test them before they are released to rest of the public. So get a clue before starting to flame.
What's under yellowstone?
Mandrake's financial troubles actually have little to do with their current business model.
See their explanation here:
www.mandrakelinux.com/en/future.php3
Briefly, after a profitable first year in 1999 as a small distro maker, they let venture capitalists into the capital.
Those investors brought in a new management team which multiplied the workforce by ten almost overnight and steered the company towards e-learning.
The results of this strategy were catastrophic - Mandrake's burn rate reached 1.5M USD/month.
In April 2001, the founders resumed control of the company, refocused on Linux and started repairing the damage.
Filing for chapter 11 was a sound decision in this context, as it gave Mandrake some breathing space to get back on its feet.
It is fairly easy to upgrade a mandrake system without taking it offline. I have a system that went from mandrake 8.2 to mandrake 9.2 without going offline. If you point urpmi to the newest distro and do an urpmi --auto-select, it will upgrade all the packages that have changed since the last disto.