Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
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.
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.
[...] 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.