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Interview with Mandrake Linux Founder Gael Duval
mcleodnine writes "In this interview
Gael Duval comments on MandrakeSoft's just released financials. He also
comments on his decision to base Mandrake on Red Hat (over Slackware), the
timeline for getting out of Chapter 11, the recent UserLinux manifesto and
barriers to acceptance for Linux on the desktop."
here are financial results of mandrake. Recently discussed on slashdot btw.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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Interview with Mandrake Linux Founder Gael Duval ( post #1)
:-)
Gael Duval, the founder of Mandrake Linux and co-founder of MandrakeSoft, agreed to an LQ interview. Here is what he had to say. Thanks Gael.
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LQ) Tell us a little about yourself, how you got into Linux and why you started Mandrake Linux?
GD) Actually I firstly discovered UNIX at University where I learned computer sciences. It was mostly on Sun with Solaris or SunOS, and I really was impressed by UNIX. In 1995 I had a 386-based PC at home with MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 runnning on it and of course it was... extremely frustrating. In particular when you are a student with absolutely no money, it was impossible to purchase all the development software for programming in C/C++/Common Lisp and others, or you had to copy it illegally. And of course it was without the documentation. So I spent more and more time at Uni working with UNIX. It was the early WWW times, and I remember I searched for "free Unix" on the Net. If I remember well, I used Yahoo! which started less than one year before, and the browser was... Mosaic
The search results showed several Linux pages. That is how I discovered Linux. A few days later, I was at home with my Slackware on 50-diskettes, still not believing that I could run a Unix-like with X11, Emacs, GCC, Lex, Yacc, Clisp and... all the documentation on my 386. A few hours later, the miracle was here: Linux was running on the PC, with OpenLook on the screen. The next great experience was when I performed the first Internet connexion by modem, through a University access.
Two years later, it was clear for me that Linux had the potential to be an excellent alternative to Windows, or maybe even a full replacement, and at the time I thought that it would be good to provide a Linux distribution that would be as easy to use as Windows. So I started to "play" with Slackware, and later with a Red Hat. It was also the time of the first versions of KDE. After a few months of work, I released the first Mandrake, in July '98, and was the first distro to ship with KDE 1.0 as default graphical environment.
LQ) Before releasing the first Mandrake version (which was based on Red Hat) you were working on a Slackware-based OS. Any regrets on that distro switch? Do you think things would be different had you not made that change?
GD) No regret at all, for a simple reason: it was not serious anymore to release a Linux distribution without a good package management like RPM. I seriously considered to switch to Debian as a base because at the time, Red Hat's reaction was very unclear (as far as I know, forking from a commercial Linux distribution never happened before Mandrake). But back in 1998, Debian's installation procedure was really not friendly at all. As a result, a key success of Mandrake was also that all packages made for Red Hat were compatible with Mandrake, including commercial packages. So the choice of RPM was the good one.
LQ) During a mid-year status update, Francois Bancilhon noted that "Our immediate goal is to exit from this status before the en of the current year" (speaking about the Chapter 11 filing). Does it look as if you will meet this deadline? How does MandrakeSoft's financial future look?
GD) Yes, our goal is now to exit from the Chapter 11 filing soon, but there is no emergency - actually it just limits the level of business we do. We will provide an exit plan on early January and it should make us leave two to three months later. It needs a court approval.
Anyway, we've just released first financial results and they are very positive. There will be a benefit for the current quarter.
LQ) What major changes and updates can we expect to see in the next Mandrake release?
GD) In addition to many improvements, there will be more and more focus on applications that are needed in daily business in small and medium corporations (office, groupware...).
LQ) What are your thoughts on the recent End of Life
Probably a troll feeding, but -
/usr that do not belong to a package. /usr -exec rpm -Vf {} \; | grep owned
Mandrake's urpmi system and rpmdrake take most of the dependancy horror out of a basic system setup (especially for new users), while allowing system a audit of system files that is near imposible on other systems.
The contributions of the Mandrake club packagers and community support have made it a joy for me.
try this with an rpm based system -
# find files in
find
#look for '5' in second column for files which are different than installed.
rpm -Va
there's no replacement for displacement
Mandrake hasn't been RedHat based since the 7.x series - the only "RedHat based" aspect of 8.x and 9.x is that it uses rpms.
"For instance, I frequently have to Google how to list the files in a package on my hard drive with rpm."
you just screamed "I'm a moron" at the top of your lungs.
rpm -q -l packagename
is that hard? I'll break it down for you...
rpm - this is the program you are calling
-q - stands for query, because that's what are doing
-l - stands for 'list'
whoops, typed too fast.
/usr -exec rpm -qf {} \; | grep owned
should be
find
with some clever use of prune, you can hunt down anything that does not belong on your box.
there's no replacement for displacement
Mandrake was the company that made RPM work, via urpmi . Obviously they recognized its weaknesses and made the improvements they believed necessary. That's how open source works and is a fine reason to maintain that respect you mentioned.
Quack, quack.
That's the reason why Mandrake offers URPMI/URPME that makes the job for you.
http://www.linux.org/apps/AppId_2189.html
Yes, urpmi is a beautiful thing. I've been using it for a while to keep our server up to date. "urpmi.update -ac;urpmi --update --auto-select" works fine for this. It automatically updates all of the packages I have installed. It will scan various FTP mirrors I have configured to retrieve all dependancies and install them.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.
One suggestion for you and other "newbies" like you then, Knoppix Just download and burn the iso image to CD (or go to a Linux User Group meeting - someone is sure to have a copy for you)... pop it in your CDROM drive, boot the CD and suddenly Linux with out pain! I've personally added a LOT more "users to the pool" via Knoppix then I ever could have via recommending Mandrake or any other distro including my personal favorite Slackware!
Bloaty?? The download version is 3 CD's, I looked at the download for Debian... 7 CD's! And I'm sorry, but Debians installer is horrid compared to Mandrakes
This is not the sig line you are looking for... -- Old Jedi Sig Line Trick
They have been ahead of Red Hat for a couple of years. To my knowledge they have been one of the most "bleeding edge" distros out there. This sometimes makes them seem very innovative, but also separates them from the masses. Examples are:
devfs by default
lvm in the installer
reseiserfs support
easy to use installer (back at version 7.0)
kernel modules are gziped.
Greater implementation of loadable kernel modules
ifplugd
I am not saying that this is necessarily better. But that they seem to have left RH far behind.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX