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MandrakeSoft Roundup
uninet writes "MandrakeSoft, the French GNU/Linux distributor who filed for bankruptcy protection one year ago last week, announced today that its first fiscal quarter of 2004 resulted in a positive operating result of 280,000. The company also announced Beta 1 of Mandrake Linux 10.0 today." Additionally, tkittel writes that "Mandrake has just announced on their club pages that they will release an updated version of their 9.2 ISO's (but just for club members). This is due to popular request after the numerous updates after the initial release." OSDN's own Robin Miller had a chance to talk with MandrakeSoft's CEO and learn more about the company's future plans.
They have a really great product. Probably the easyest to use Linux distro. Red Hat was succesfull, why couldn't they?
The link provides this:
Anounced today that its first fiscal quarter of 2004 resulted in a positive operating result of [EURO] 280,000
Somehow I think some browswers do not like Euro symbol.
I think Mandrake is a good way to get a lot of people using Linux. It's polished GUI is good for proving what Linux can be when you don't need command line control. Glad to see they're still going.
What with RedHat Standard moving to Fedora and Mandrake looking shaky, things were looking bad. Fedora has turned out to be quite good and Madrake are surviving. Just SCO to go bankrupt and the world will be right again.
My favorite distro yet has probably been Mandrake 9.1. It was the easiest to compile DVD playing for, ran my Windows games well with WineX, and didn't jack around with my sound like most other distros (I have some rare BA speakers notorious for Linux incompatibilities. Only Drake9.1/SUSE/Lycoris seem to recognize them). At the moment I'm running the barely tolerable Win98 because frankly, that's the only way I can play Homeworld or Halo. ;)
It's good to hear Mandrake is doing well, it's been my preffered distribution since version 7.0 or so. A lot of people are still under the impression that Mandrake is just a Red Hat clone with KDE as the default WM but the distribution has come a long way since then. It has a nice installer and a lot of nice tools, good hardware detection and unlike most desktop oriented distro's, it isn't crippled in any way.
... 280,000 Euro, which is around $358,000.
Additionally, there are two important facts in their financial results: 1) revenue has increased of +8.4% compared to the same quarter for year 2002/03 2) the gross margin increased of +28.9% during the same time. More importantly: their gross margin has reached 82% of revenue. This is excellent and shows that their business model has improved much and potentially makes MandrakeSoft a very profitable company.
Nice shot for a pure Open Source company.
if you guys read the second link to newsforge you would see there is a community and official version. My guess is that the community version is going to be for bleeding edge while in 3 months the official one is more stable, but then again thats my guess. My hopes is that both versions are free. Also Mandrake is not like lindows. Mandrake can be used both for command line and non commandline things. Makes a good replacement to Red Hat 9 in my opinion
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/100beta.php3
according tot hat they ARE using kde 3.2 . Mandrake won't release an terribly unstable OS, don't worry. Its only beta one, it'll have plenty of time for bug fixing. May I remind you that KDE 3.2 is only a point release. It probably won't have all that many bugs.
Photos.
Get in from here.
There's more information on the beta in the Mandrake Linux Wiki
Either that or buy the PowerPack, that's what I recommend all the time. + Like that you save time since you already have the NVidia drivers and such...
Just my 0.02 EUR
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
I thought that was what Lindows was for.
You have the cli if you want it, you just don't need it, and it's a very welcome change when setting up complex systems (like application servers with vpns over the web etc...). You gain days on the installation.
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
As far as Live CDs go, Knoppix is still superior for the development tools, and setting up persistant storage that plays well with FAT32. But this last release is starting to close that gap. And it looks stunning.
I use Mandrake 9.2, but PCLOS is so much better... My wife likes to watch Starting Over, but she can't see any of the previews on the website because they are in Quicktime. Naturally, there's no QuickTime for Linux plugin available. With PCLOS, it just works.
I've managed to muck something up on my Mandrake desktop, because I have to wait an additional minute after the desktop is installed while it's doing something - I can't figure what, probably trying to get the soundcard to work - and reinstalling Mandrake hasn't taken care of it. CUPS doesn't want to talk to my laser printer, but it works just fine under lpr... It's a complete mess.
I'm not quite ready to dump Mandrake (PCLOS is still beta), but some of Texstar's RPMs will be installed on my machine Real Soon Now.
I am sure most people know this already but Mandrake 9.2 (The current version) most certainly includes a kernel higher than 2.2.
from http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/9.2/features/
Mandrake Linux 9.2 features the following software:
Kernel 2.4.22 (a Linux 2.6.0pre kernel is also provided in contribs)
--
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
This seems like a sucky time to bring out 10.0.
Nah. Mandrake typically has a loong testing cycle. They Don't *usually* suffer from the "don't buy point-oh releases" that Red Hat has tended to suffer from. They will probably release beta 2 next month and maybe beta 3 shortly thereafter. Then they will move from beta, into release canidates where they typically will go to rc3 or rc4 over the span of 2-3 months. Mandrake is a ways off from actually releasing 10.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
EUR 280,000 = USD 356,140 = UKP 193,144 = JPY 37,835,034.
In case you were wondering.
According to Mandrake's website, LG released firmware updates to their drives back in November. So you should be safe if you download those.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Mandrake is selling a bootable-CDROM based distro called Mandrake Move. Your ~/ is stored on a USB Flash drive -- so, you boot the CD w/ the Flash installed and whatever PC your on is your own.... the way you 'left-it'.
Very cool idea. Now, if they could get the whole distro onto one of those card-sized cdroms we'd be set.
http://66.90.75.92/torrents/1005/MandrakeLinux-10. 0-beta1.torrent
Enjoy
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
The article says that a big difference between the "community" release and Fedora is that whilst Fedora is entirely separate from Red Hat, Red Hat makes no promises etc., the Mandrake "community" release will still be done under the Mandrake banner, by Mandrake employees and the article says *supported* by Mandrake employees as part of their jobs. I presume that support will be the same as what the current download version gets. I get the impression that the community release is just a new name for the current download version. It is still an 'official' Mandrake product (unlike Fedora). Mandrake releases every 6 months now anyway.
". The "community" version of Mandrake will still be produced by company developers and supported by MandrakeSoft employees as part of their job, unlike the Fedora project which is produced outside of Red Hat's formal development structure and supported by volunteers."
It seems more like they are adding a new product called the "official" version which will have a longer release cycle.
An essential difference between Mandrake and Redhat is that whilst Redhat is abandoning the (home) desktop (which is part of the reason for the move to spin off the free version as an unsupported volunteer product), the home desktop is probably one of Mandrake's biggest areas.
Definitely...when I put Linux on some curious friend's spare machine for them, it's always Mandrake. It is easy to configure most things, but it is still a very standard GNU/Linux stack.
I'm hopefull, though, that with this new catalyst build process, Gentoo 2004 (stage3/grp style of course) might be able to overtake it. I run Gentoo/Mandrake/FreeBSD mostly, but Gentoo is by far the most fun. And it's certainly safe from the "windows knockoff" stigma you mention.
That's not to say anything against Mandrake, of course...it's just that Gentoo is so much closer to the source, to the part that separates us from them.
Not to put it in such polar terms...
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Simple, its the best SRPM eater and fastest RPM producer around. Just look e.g. on www.rpmfind.net and search for that favorate package. Mandrake and/or Mandrake Cooker editions always show up.
:
:
o ad &name=Splatt_Forum&file=viewtopic&topic=16806&foru m=9
They have a development engine which rockz
Thread model: posix
gcc version 3.3.1 (Mandrake Linux 9.2 3.3.1-2mdk)
Basicly IMHO Mandrake 9.2 is just latest redhat _without_ corporate intervenance...
I tried Mandrake 9.2RC1 AMD64 on a ASUS K8V board with that AMD Athlon AMD64 3200+ CPU , which is running 2200MHz/1024kb cache. And also their x86_64 development platform rockz. All i386 based SRPMS it just compiled with warp-12 speed into *.x86_64.rpm's.
read e.g.
http://www.mandrakeclub.com/modules.php?op=modl
Robert
tehanu is correct; "support period" != "release schedule"
In fact, there was a slashdot story about a month ago detailing Mandrakesoft's support policy, which is lots longer than the release schedule.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
[...] but their page asks for personal info so I went away and soon switched distros for this and other reasons.
As MandrakeSoft is a European company, I don't think their request for personal information is really a good reason for not choosing them. European privacy legislature is actually quite strict and pro-consumer, and any entity collecting personal information must have a clear and valid reason for doing so. The information also cannot be sold to 3rd parties without the customer's consent, nor can it be sold/transferred to countries with insufficient privacy legislature (e.g. USA). There might be other reasons for not choosing Mandrake, but I don't think privacy concern is one of them.
FCS, will the Windows fans shut up about the fact that a Mandrake release caused problems with a minority of broken drives already?! The LG read-only drives had a bad firmware fault. The ATAPI spec says what command code is supposed to perform what function and how to handle it if that function is not applicable. The LG drive did not conform to spec -- it used the "flush buffer" command {which only does anything useful on a writer} for "begin flash upgrade", which is forbidden by the ATAPI spec {which clearly states a different command code for "begin flash upgrade"}. Mandrake's auto-detection routine issued a "flush buffer" command to see if that did anything -- a writer would return "OK", a read-only drive would return "Command not implemented". At least, if the drives conformed to the published ATAPI specification. LG deviated from the specification. I'm sure if Windows had used the same trick to perform auto-detection, and LG had run afoul of it, Bill Gates would be held totally blameless.
If you are driving your car on the wrong side of the road, don't blame me in the event of a collision.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
No, that's my point - there isn't a full fix on the Mandrake site. What there is, is a small list of tested drives, but by no means all LG drives. (And even some of those present are listed as "unknown status".)
Equally, LG released upgraded firmware for some, but not all drives.
And the procedure for resurrecting dead drives is only applicable to desktop drives - it relies on fiddling with jumpers, something that's not practical (or even possible?) with a notebook.
In short, if your drive isn't on the very small list that has been both tested and either approved, or had a patch released for it, then the issue isn't fixed at all.
I had a very prompt delivery, but it was strange. I got the 9.2 DVD like TWO DAYS after submitting the order, although I didn't specify any fast delivery. The package had been sent from some wacky-named small company a few miles away from me. When I first saw the parcel I was sure it was some goofy sales pitch from new-age transendantal hippy organization. (I forgot the company's name on the return address, but it was really spacey.)
A week after I got my package the Mandrake ordering system notified me that the package had "just been shipped". Obviously they have some interesting way of outsourcing their delivery process. I just happened to be a "lucky one" I guess.
Sidenote: DAMN but it's nice to get a distro on a DVD! With the most recent versions of RedHat I was swapping CD's constantly for installs. It reminded me of the last days of floppy installations. Anyone remember circa 1995 getting softward that came on 10+ floppy disks?
Last miscellaneous comment: I love my Mandrake! It fascinates me that there are comments about 9.2 being buggy. I moved after the RedHat decision and my 9.2 installation on two computers has been the most stable and pain free of the last many many years. I guess you can never know when you are going to get hit with an installation bug.
Murray Todd Williams