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."

Comments

Mandrake Move

[rf0]

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

Rus

Re:Mandrake Move

[smittyoneeach]

RUNT will get you to a command prompt off of your USB keyfob, assuming USB drive with boot-from-floppy allowed.
You'd probably want to get your Beyond Linux From Scratch on to give you something beyond that, e.g., a desktop.
Linux, like all good IT projects, is blessed/cursed with flexibility...
And flexibility, like any good PHB can tell you, is the key to indecision.

Mandrake is awesome

[iamdrscience]

I pretty much only use Debian for linux, but Mandrake is pretty cool. Mainly for how simple it is. It's a distro that I know I could give to most people (largely computer inexperienced) I know if they wanted to play with Linux. The simple installer is as easy as installing a *nix distro gets. Period. It is, in fact, easier than the Windows installer is.

Re:Mandrake is awesome

[TheWanderingHermit]

It's really nice to hear a Debian devotee praising Mandrake. I've been using Mandrake since I started seriously using Linux (my first exposure was Suse 6.4). I've tried Debian and, while I like apt, I found that I didn't have time to do all the setup things I needed to -- like setting up the mount points when I wanted to play DVDs (which isn't just for entertainment if you're doing video production). I respect Debian and the power it provides, but I prefer Mandrake, since I can get a production box up and running extremely quickly.

I've found it frustrating because many times I've heard people deride Mandrake because it is so easy to use, and I've especially heard a lot of Debian users deride it (then again, I've heard many Debian users deride anything BUT Debian). I've always thought there was a place for most of the distros out there, and Mandrake is great for beginners, or experienced users who need easy and quick installation.

I'm glad to hear from another distro user (especially an advanced one like Debian) recognizing the value of Mandrake.

Re:Mandrake is awesome

[Lane.exe]

Mandrake is good period. It's Linux. It's not like there's something other Linux distros do that Mandrake can't. Package management? urpmi. What advantage does apt have over urpmi? I can't think of one. Ease of install? Hands down to Mandrake. Ease of configuration? Drakconf, userdrak, diskdrak, wow... all easy to use and they do the same thing as any comparable configuration method.

Don't knock Mandrake simply because it can be easy to use. It's also just as powerful as anything else, provided you have the experience to use the power-user features. There's nothing that says "just because this system is more obtuse and harder to use must mean it's more powerful!" That's a misconception that a lot of people need to get out of their heads.

Re:Mandrake is awesome

[ValentineMSmith]

Disclaimer: I haven't used Mandrake seriously since Mandrake 8.0 (and my memory is a little fuzzy about the versions and dates), so the following complaints may no longer be applicable.

I'd tried to use Mandrake seriously a while back, and found it virtually unusable for many of the same reasons I find Windows unusable. I grew up in (semi-) elder days, and learned to configure my Linux system the old fashioned way: I'd go to my /etc directory, find the config file, and edit it.

Why did I have to hand-edit? Because the network settings editor would not allow me to enter and tweak the settings as I required for my home network.

The last time I tried doing so with an out-of-the-box Mandrake system, I could make the change in the /etc/ directory (assuming I could find the file: they did some screwy things to some of the locations and names of some of the config files, IIRC), but even the files that I could find and change were overwritten by their configuration program. It seems that they were kind enough to store a second copy of the values and would do a blanket update when you started any of their config apps.

That would have been bad enough, but the thing that finally turned me off was being unable to download a patch for a stock kernel and being unable to apply it (it was just after the Zaurus SL-5000D came out, and you needed a patch to get the communications layer working between the OS and the PDA working correctly). If I have to hand hack the patch into place, I don't want to use the distro.

Thank God for Slackware.

Re:Mandrake is awesome

[abhikhurana]

Hmm, I agree that it is a bit hard to edit the files by hand, but Mandrake comes with extensive online documentation and if you had looked, you would have found how to change the settings manually.

As far as applying the patch to the kernel, well mandrake adds some features like supermount to the kernel they ship which sometimes means that you can't apply the patches but, one mandrake does give you linus kernel in their urpmi repository and secondly, it is equally easy to download a stock kernel and then apply the patch. So I don't think that is a good criteria to judge a kernel. The fact of the matter is, Mandrake philosophy has always been to make it easy to use and so they add features like supermount. But that doesn't take away the power from you to replace the kernel alltogether. For example, I personally run 2.6 test 11, but then I don't use supermount. How does that make a distro bad is beyond me.

Re:Mandrake is awesome

[Malor]

I use Mandrake on my desktops and Debian on my servers. I run quite a number of servers, so I speak with some experience here.

Debian excels at remote management. Everything is tuned that way. Everything (EVERYTHING) is administered from the command prompt. (There may be graphical tools as well, but I never install those...I just configure in text.) Want to upgrade packages on a server 5000 miles away? Debian makes that trivial. And you never have to reinstall the OS (barring major catastrophe), so you can maintain remote servers over a long period (years) comfortably, without ever needing to touch them. RPM-based distros simply don't work like that... you can do maintenance updates remotely (except possibly SSH), but to upgrade to a newer release you have to do it from the console.

Where Mandrake is really good is in desktop presentation. They have a lot of very nice tools to administer things with. I'm running on a freshly-installed 9.2, and it's very, very nice. It is a completely functional desktop that's comfortable and easy to use. I run Mandrake 100% of the time as my desktop here at work, and fire up VMWare to support the Windows questions. It's gotten good enough that I'm seriously considering switching my main machine at home to Mandrake as well, and just keeping Windows around for gaming. It has come that far. (I particularly like Konqueror, which is an outstanding web browser.)

But both distros have problems. Mandrake's makes it harder to use, IMO, for servers.... it has to be reinstalled with every new release. I realize it has an 'upgrade' option, but this A) requires that you take the server offline for a couple of hours; B) RPM-based distros just don't upgrade well; (Admittedly, I haven't tried this since about RedHat 8.0, so it may have improved ... treat this as an old data point that needs confirmation.) C) You have to be physically at the machine to upgrade it, which makes true remote management very difficult; and a related D) it used to be hard or impossible to upgrade SSH over an SSH connection using RPM. This may be fixed by now.

Mandrake's model is much like Windows... each new iteration is a significant jump forward, and most of the new improvements are not backported to the old versions, unless you use an outside RPM source like the Penguin Liberation Front. This model fits some IT shops very well... it doesn't suit my style as much.

As an aside, be a little careful with the PLF packages. My work system seems to suffer from significant bitrot; each installation has developed problems, after six or nine months, that required a reinstall. Most recently I had a runaway KDE artsd demon that was causing me all kinds of problems, and then suddenly my font antialiasing stopped working. Ended up wiping the system and upgrading to 9.2.... which, btw, is very nice, now that they've got the kinks out.

Anyway, getting back to compare/contrast: Debian's three-tiered system provides finer granularity. They have "stable", which is old but very proven software, "testing", which is where they hammer out the next stable release, and "unstable", which is where all the bleeding-edge stuff goes. The release process is continuous and ongoing, and upgrades generally involve a few minutes of downtime instead of hours; the granularity is much finer. You can choose to upgrade, say, just Apache or just Samba and leave everything else untouched, should you choose. However, this incremental upgrade process does come with a cost... you can find out too late that the most recent package breaks something. They had a nasty bug in LILO awhile back that broke all our SCSI-based Intel SRMK2s... after an apt-get dist-ugprade, the machines were no longer able to reboot. This was Not Good, and required a rush trip to the colo to fix. It's a little more chaotic, a little less controlled.... but of course, if you want pure stability, there's always "stable".

The Debian project itself seems to be suffering from some burnout too..

Re:Why does everyone care so much?

[ViolentGreen]

Mandrake is a good distro for new users. It is cake to partition, install and use. You don't have to know any command line applications to configure your system. While this may be true for other distros as well, Mandrake does this very well.

Alot of people, including myself, think that mandrake is the closest thing to a desktop linux for the masses currently available.

Re:good for them

[MoonFog]

I totally agree, and Mandrake is a great distro. I don't like SuSE's way of releasing their distro (ftp anyone?), and Redhat dropped the free version entirely, so for the desktop I usually recommend Mandrake for people just wanting to try Linux. I have great respect for their installer, which I find to be excellent!
IMHO this is great news, and as you say hopefully others will follow this model.

The latest version can be bought of Mandrake or downloaded from Linuxiso.org.
Feel like supporting ?

Okay.

[/dev/trash]

http://www.mandrakesoft.com/products/mandrakemove
But doesn't Knoppix already do this?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Business model?

[cperciva]

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.

That's my point. Simply asking for donations wasn't enough to keep them out of bankruptcy. MandrakeSoft only turned around after telling everyone that they were about to go out of business.

Re:What?

[jmb-d]

Since when is "Chapter 11-like protection" a good business model??

Since staying in business is better than going out of business, quite a while.

In the early 90s, I worked for a company that filed for Chapter 11 protection while I was on vacation.

"D'ah!" thought I.

Not a terrible thing, really. Debt got restructured (read: our creditors took it in the a**), we got rid of a whole lot of things we didn't really need (read: way too much floorspace (including a no-longer-used manufacturing area)), and got out of a lease on said space, moving to a more appropriate-sized office at a much lower per-foot cost. Then came a couple of years of consecutive positive cash-flow, and *poof* we were out of Chapter 11. Never missed a paycheck, got raises during that time, etc.

No big deal from where I stand.

Would it have been better to have had a better handle on what was going on before it got to the point where Chapter 11 protection was necessary?

You bet.

Was it a handy way of saving the company?

Damn skippy.

Quality impact?

[infolib]

The last Mandrake release had a bunch of bugfix updates right after the ISOs went golden requiring the users to download many megabytes of updates. Could this be a result of firing developers? Has anyone seen the lay-offs impacting quality?

I'm quite curious since I use Mdk myself.