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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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http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread .php?threadid=126031
;)
"jeremy
root"
You shouldn't post to forums as root, it's a sure sign you're a newbie
Fortress of Insanity
I suggest modders mod obvious karma whoring up as Funny. That way readers get to see the post, but the whore gets no karma.
You can't start off as a purist. If not for Mandrake and the confidence its foolproof GUI tools gave me, I never would've tried Linux. I can't just go out and break my computer; I need my computer. The reason to install a new OS is to make the machine do more, not stop working altogether. Mandrake lets you start using Linux and get comfortable before moving up in the world.
Mandrake is a good distro, but unfortunatly in its developmental process it was following the wake of Red Hat.
Visit Phrite's Tech News/Security Tools
I don't know all that much about the practical (ie: deployed) differences between Fedora and RHE, and I haven't used Mandrake in a while, but with the recent split of offerings by Red Hat I was wondering about some repercussions.
Does anybody know if Mandrake is going to continue to use Red Hat as its base? Will they be using Fedora? Do people who've used Fedora, 'classic' Red Hat and Mandrake have an opinion on what's going to end up happening to the quality of Mandrake's product as a result?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Bwahahahahahhahahaha..
Tell me another one.
If you haven't suffered the ills of RPMs, then you haven't much experience my friend.
clifgriffin > blog
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
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I second the grandparent's question. urpmi is an excellent packaging tool, up there with apt-get. It actually resolves conflicts and dependancies. You must be thinking of rpm around 97/98. Things have moved on, you know.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
That pales in comparison to a potential answer...
Q"What distro would you use without Mandrake?"
A"Caldera"
</joke>
I can't say that I have much trouble with RPM. You just have to be careful that you the correct RPMs for your OS.
Just because quite a few idiots put out RPMs that stomp all over peoples systems, doesn't mean that RPM is bad. It means that some people are idiots.
You can cause the same mess with other packinging systems if you do not package the apps correctly.
Although I agree that a purist distro is a good thing, the main reason why people don't use linux is because they don't want to mess around with command line.
That's one large thing preventing linux from completely destroying microsoft, it's not as easy to use. Although I agree for many people it's good to compile your own software, I do it, it's simply not logical to force everyone to do it because it can be a painful process.
Your response falls into the "who is the target audience?" question. For many of us who started with Linux 8 or 9 years ago, Mandrake and similar distros are a blight on the promise of Linux. Distributions that are so bloated, over-done, and frankly tacky are in direct conflict with what Linux was, at least when I started using it, and what it still is with distributions like Slackware and Gentoo. My target audience for Linux is different than Mandrakesofts. Both can get along, as long as we realize there is a need for both, and no one road, concept is ultimately correct, just correct for the ones that see fit to use it.
Or how about "Karma whore" points?
Too many, and you get a "Karma STD" and you can't post for 9 hours.
Pure Flamebait. Why is this modded up?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
What exactly is 'purist Linux'? Do you mean a good distro should require lots of knowledge to setup/install?
I like Slackware and Debian personally, but Madrake was one of the first distros that a relatively ordinary user could install without help.
It's your kind of attitude that helps keep Linux away from the masses.
LQ) If you couldn't use Mandrake what Linux distribution would you use?
GD) This is the most difficult question I ever had to answer in an interview! :-) That's a frightening question actually because I can't see any alternative that could fit my requirements: friendly, full-featured, powerful, stable, fully open-sourced...
So, if there were no Mandrake it would be neccessary to create one!
In other words, rpm man-page is close to useless because it does not include examples of the most common use. You learn by doing, not by reading a comprehensive list of all the options and switches.
I wish Debian were more modern. I miss apt-get, but I like bleeding edge hardware more and it's usually only either Mandrake or Red Hat that installs cleanly.
Another problem is that any package management system makes it hard to combine stuff that you've compiled yourself and regular packages.
The owls are not what they seem
About your last point.
Just build a RPM for what you are compiling then install the RPM.
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
Maybe Mandrake does not represent purist Linux, but its existence brought Linux near lot of people; and, most important thing, made developers aware they need to implement simple interfaces.
nirvanis
"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
As long as Linux has hardcore gurus, there will be hardcore distros. It's just that you can't get as many potential hardcore gurus that are willing to dive right in as you would if you offer a gradual approach.
I miss apt-get
If you're using any recent RedHat distribution, you can download apt-get for it from freshrpms.net. You could also try yum, which I found quite usable.
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.
In my experience, it seems Mandrake has gotten a reputation as being "all graphical like Windows", and I find a lot of "geeks" look down upon it for just that reason.
/boot partition.
I've been using Linux since Slackware 3.4 (1998/99?), I've installed and used almost every distro under the sun for both servers and desktops (haven't tried Gentoo yet though) and I must say Mandrake is by far the easiest _and_ most configurable distro I've ever used. The last part is especially important for the "geeks".
For example, without spending a lot of time, or downloading obscure "boot images", what other distro is there that supports ReiserFS, JFS, XFS, LVM, and a super easy way (graphical) to setup software RAID with all the above partitions straight from the boot CD. Mandrake has supported all of this since at least v8.0. It took me longer to find a Debian boot image that uses the 2.4 kernel just to support my very common hardware raid card then it did to install Mandrake with ReiserFS on the
I can hear the Debian fans screaming already... "But Debian has APT". Yes, it does, and APT is great. RedHat has APT now too, but Mandrake has had URPMI for years, which essentially does exactly what APT does, only its easier to use, both from the command line and graphically! Since about Mandrake 9.0 it has also supported installing packages on multiple machines at the same time.
To top it all off, Mandrake's setup utilities, such as PrinterDrake, HardDrake (for configuring hardware) are top notch. I was blown away when I loaded up PrinterDrake... said "Search for printers on your network" and it came back with all 6 of our (different) printers setup and ready to use. I don't think it was more then TWO clicks! Thats something even WindowsXP can't claim.
In short, Mandrake isn't just for newbies, its an excellent distro for even veterans of Linux who would rather spend time coding, or tweeking important performance settings instead of mucking about setting up printers or searching for "boot images" just to support year old hardware or file systems other then EXT2/3.
Open Source Time and Attendance, Job Costing a
With more distro's sliding towards pay-only and the others hard on the newbies, Mandrake is more or less the ONLY distro adding new users to the pool. I have a (Windows-)job and two kids, and without Mandrake there would be no time for me to try Linux.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Ah, yes, the friendly Linux community...
Did you read my post? I don't care to read through a goddamned list of all the possible options. I want a quick and dirty "examples" section in the manual.
Besides, your example does not work:
rpm -ql flightgear-0.9.3-1grk.i386.rpm
package flightgear-0.9.3-1grk.i386.rpm is not installed
The owls are not what they seem
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.
This is certainly one of the most interesting part of this interview, and I think too few people aren't aware of these facts... And I would add URPMI:
LQ) What would you consider Mandrake's largest innovation or contribution to Linux?
MD) Proof that Linux is not only for geeks (focus on ease of use), first graphical installer, first remote update utility (including graphical front-end), security levels, transparent access to devices, first Linux releases as an ISO image...
"purist Linux"
i.e. elitist Linux? Because I can't think of any practical use of the term (you only use the kernel?). I am convinced there are many users who want Linux to remain their little domain and keep great open source software from normal people - All so they can claim themselves purists.
I would have liked to have seen one asking him about the Common conception among some Linux users I know that Mandrake is very bloaty. You can see form my sig I run lean and mean Gentoo.
A psychopath can't tell the difference between right and wrong. A sociopath knows the difference - he just doesn't care.
on the bottom of this page you can see in some nice tables what versions Mandrake currently uses. (e.g. koffice in 9.2 is 1.3beta3)
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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As far as urpmi -- it may work well, but (back in the Mandrake 7.x days) I found the command-line options mystifying if I wanted to get close to the full functionality of the GUI Mandrake Update tool -- and that GUI tool itself is possibly the worst app foisted upon the Linux world since Gnome 1.0.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
"And I would also hope he knows that Mandrake is in no way more full featured, powerful, stable, or fully open-sourced than Slackware or a variety of other more pure Linux distros."
I'm sure he knows quite well how his distro stacks up against the rest. I'm sure he knows in what ways it differs, and in what ways it's the same. I think it telling that his first criterion was "friendly", not "pure".
Exactly what do you mean by "more pure"? Do you mean idealogically pure? Chemically? Do you mean "less friendly"? Unprofitable? More difficult to use? Less cluttered? Less restricted by closed-source code? I'm asking, seriously.
While I understand the suggestion that such an ubergeek as Gael Duval wouldn't *need* a more friendly distro, he might *want* one. Even those of us who are able to recompile the kernel with a new driver we've written in order to use our new MegaMouse might prefer to have the distro simply find it and use it. In fact, it seems to me that ease-of-use is one of Mandrake's primary goals.
It seems to me that "friendly" is a useful characteristic. Perhaps Mandrake would be even better if it had "Don't Panic" written in large friendly letters on the front cover.
I would suggest, furthermore, that this goal of being "friendly" is likely to have more useful impact on the adoption of Linux for desktop use than the "learn everything about everything" approach of, say, a Slackware. Which is not to imply the greater validity for one approach over the other, of course. Horses for courses, I'd say.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
So you wish to challenge AMA?
The owls are not what they seem
Let's turn the argument around. How hard can it be to provide examples of the most commonly used commands?! Cdrecord does it perfectly.
The owls are not what they seem
the Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX banner ads that are liberally sprinkled through the /. site. The ads should have an amputee starting blankly at a Rubik's Cube.
Absolutely.
The question was whether it should be banned from general public who would wash themselves and their kitchen sink daily in it just because they've got a friggin' viral infection.
reduce ZITS in children that are prine to acne.
If you knew anything about medicine, you'd know that there are far better alternatives than run-of-the-mill antibacterial soap. Furthermore, average acne is a social not a medical problem. Most people grow over it completely without medication. Mentally scarred? Talk to a psychologist.
cross contaminiation from sick family members
If a member of the family has a viral infection, the chances are that everybody's going to get it. If it's a bacterial infection, the chances are still that everybody's going to get it even if you shower in anti-bacterial soap. The difference is that not showering in the soap does not produce bugs that are immune.
I guess my bottom line is this: it's natural to get sick once in a while. Stop fighting it! You're only making it worse by employing anti-bacterial soaps at home - leave some ammo for us healthcare professionals!
The owls are not what they seem
I absolutely agree with your point about the overuse of antibiotics, but I have to say I question whether somebody who refers to his/her patients as "little brats" should be practicing medicine. (Of course, what this all has to do with Mandrake is beyond me.)
Ummm why is he a troll? He made a really valid point - Mandrake took redhat and tweaked it so much that it lost a lot of it's compatibility and contributed further to the current Linux fragmentation situation.
He's not trolling - he's making a very valid point.
Sunday you're Thinking Different, Monday you're a huge tool, paying too much and waiting to think like everyone else.
If it is that easy, why don't you make a guide to commonly used rpm commands?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
True, that giving out antibiotics like candy to those with a viral infection is a bad idea, it's not even the tip of the iceberg. How many people are aware that there are millions , if not billions of cattle, chickens, turkeys, pigs, and sheep that are fed antibiotics on a daily basis? This is because factory farming methods keep them in such unsanitary, cramped, inhumane conditions, that if any one of them gets sick, it threatens to wipe the whole herd/flock out.
Heck, they even mentioned on ABC that Cypro(sp?), the drug of last resort for Anthrax, is getting less and less effective because of all the poultry on a drug very similar to it. BTW, a friend of mine is dead because a strain of bacteria that's common in cattle developed resistance to antibiotics and she got it.
This isn't the sig you're looking for...
Slashdot is the only society I've ever known in which, when someone does something that everyone in the community likes, they are attacked and called a "whore".
Do you think doctors are any better in this respect than the geeks manning helpdesks?
The owls are not what they seem
Some of their GUI tools are annoying, though. Like the network GUI forces you to use a wizard to setup your network settings. Fine if you use DHCP. A pain in the butt if you use static IP and want to just go back and make a change. It's silly crap like that that prevents me from really giving Mandrake a shot. That and the bugs.
Oh, so I shouldn't report my troubles I have with rpm unless I contribute?
The owls are not what they seem
Unlike other distributions, Mandrake doesn't use proprietary setup tools (SuSe's SAX is proprietary for example as is some of Red Hat's stuff I believe). IMHO, rolling your good tools and releasing them open-source and making a 100% OSS distro is as purist to OSS as you can get.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
But what if I need perl 5.6x and not perl 5.8x as well as apache 1.3x instead of 2.0x due to compatiblities? How would I do this on an rpm based system?
Yes I could download untar and compile it myself but what if my apps require perl 5.8? See the problem?
Even Debian has this problem. Only FreeBSD, Solaris, Slackware and Gentoo can solve it.
I will stay away from any rpm system thank you.
http://saveie6.com/
Fair enough, it can be a little obscure.
"For instance, I frequently have to Google how to list the files in a package on my hard drive with rpm."
Surely, once you've found out how to do it the first time, a quick look at the man page will remind you what the option was again. And anyway, after doing something simple like that 2 or 3 times, most people start to remember how to do it - so I'm surprised you "frequently" have to Google.
"In other words, rpm man-page is close to useless because it does not include examples of the most common use."
It may be close to useless for people who don't spend more than a few seconds looking for something. But I do think you're right - for complex commands like "rpm", examples of the most common uses would help.
"You learn by doing...."
Then why do you "frequently" have to Google ? Why not use your computer to automate what appears to be a regular task:
mkdir doc
vi doc/my-rpm-hints.txt Then use your own hints file whenever you need to look up something you've done before.
"I miss apt-get, but I like bleeding edge hardware more and it's usually only either Mandrake or Red Hat that installs cleanly."
You could install Mandrake and use "urpmi" which many people have mentioned in many Mandrake articles here.
"Another problem is that any package management system makes it hard to combine stuff that you've compiled yourself and regular packages."
That's why anything you compile yourself should go either in
Agreed, though, that this use of
hmm.
[croddy@debianbox ~]$ gcc (tab)(tab)
gcc gcc-3.0 gccbug gccbug-3.3
gcc-2.95 gcc-3.3 gccbug-3.0 gccmakedep
[croddy@debianbox ~]$ python (tab)(tab)
python python2.1 python2.3
[croddy@debianbox ~]$ automake (tab)(tab)
automake automake-1.7
[croddy@debianbox ~]$ autoconf (tab)(tab)
autoconf autoconf-wrapper autoconf2.13 autoconf2.50
You can't start off as a purist.
I think you mean you can't. Obviously someone could, or we wouldn't have Linux at all.
Obviously you've not been around here long enough. :)
:)
Of course - you HAVE to contribute in order to earn the 'right' to criticize. At that point it's not criticism tho, it's just 'innovation'.
Seriously, I'm in total agreement with you. rpm -qpl doesn't make sense based on the 'rpm --help' output, because "l" says it'll list files in a package. Why do I need to further use "p" to say that I mean a "package file"? It makes NO sense. What would help it make sense is better docs.
The best you could do would be to make a help page someplace and hope it gets googled. These issues have come up for years and nothing extra productive has ever been added to the rpm man page or --help output. rpm --showfilesinrpm would be handy, but it ain't gonna happen. Who would add in something which would make it useful to people who haven't committed their lives to arcane command-line crap?
creation science book
Have you read that cnn article ? It says that the WHO is worried about the use of anti-bacterial agents in general cosmetic products but that the AMA ( whatever that is ) is stopping short of discouraging people from using them due to pressure from the cosmetic industry.
I think this is really agreeing with the parent post but illustrating that the AMA is subject to pressure from industry lobbying groups.
By outsourcing, Mandrake saved a fortune and prevented the company from going belly up.
What exactly did Mandrake outsource?
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
Bug reports are also a form of contibution. But that wasn't what I was talking about. If you wan't someone to make a page with common urpmi commands you may as well be the one who does it, I found it in the manual.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
For instance Caldera had a graphical installer before Mandrake
Merriam-Webster. Purist: one who adheres strictly and often excessively to a tradition.
Me. Purist linux: something to uselessly lose your time doing something that doesn't need to be done, just for the sake of it.
Very interesting. I see your point.
The moderation system is largely disfunctional. It would be great to think of a better way.
AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!! DEPENDENCY CIRCLES!!!!!!!
Ah, whew, switched to gentoo. Just a nightmare...
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F Scott Fitzgerald