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.

Comments

How much was operating revenue?

[RaboKrabekian]

This isn't meant as a flame, I wish Mandrake well.

But how much of their income last quarter was due to donations, and do they expect to be able to keep that up? I really don't know, and I'd like to hear from soemone in the know.

Re:How much was operating revenue?

[Eggplant62]

how much of their income last quarter was due to donations, and do they expect to be able to keep that up? I really don't know, and I'd like to hear from soemone in the know.

MandrakeClub is a worthwhile service in my own personal opinion, one which I'm glad to purchase. I had paid my subscription 2 years in advance, so I'm just surfing along. I continue to buy the distribution in the powerpack cd version, 7 cd's loaded with stuff. Yes there have been quality control issues but my own equipment wasn't affected. I was embarrassed, though, when I had to replace a friend's CDROM drive when the install of 9.2 went sour.

I've got stock in the company and I love the distribution. It's easy to use, comes very well customized to my own needs, and is easily tweaked up with everything that I need, whether I'm running it on my serversl or laptops or whatever. I'm proud to say that I support Mandrake.

Re:How much was operating revenue?

[13Echo]

I gave them $70 when the club first started, even though I was using Slackware. Why? I used several versions of Mandrake when I was begining to "get my feet wet" with Linux. Mandrake was pretty simple to use, though it didn't really hook me like Slackware did. Never-the-less, I felt that I owed them a bit of a contribution for what they gave me... It was the least I could do.

Re:How much was operating revenue?

[sharkey]

Let's see $60 per year is $180 over three years. I typically change OS'es around every three years. Currently retail for Windows XP is $299 (full edition), although I'm sure you could get it cheaper if you tried. That's only $40 per year more than you pay for Mandrake - hardly exorbitant.

Apples to oranges. For $60/year with Mandrake you get tho OS, the world's dominant webserver with no concurrent connection limits, multiple RDBMSes, multiple WYSIWYG "office suites", ftp server, ntp server, DNS server, DHCP server, SMB file server with no limit on concurrent connections, WINS server, LDAP server, stateful firewalling capabilities, SMTP server, SSH server, C/C++, Fortran 77, Objective C, Java and Ada 95 developement tools, PHP, Perl and Python for scriping.

Windows XP "full edition" (Professional?) provides all that, plus no restrictions on the number of computers it can be installed on, or the number of CPUs in said computers, and high-speed .torrents for only $40 more per year than Mandrake?

Be careful

[apoupc]

I ordered Mandrake 9.2 when it came out and cancelled the order 2 weeks later when they didn't deliver it. After 2 months of numerous emails back and forth of emails of "Refund process can take up to ten business days. We have recontacted our financial department about your order." I still have not received a refund.

Re:Why now?

[dot-magnon]

10.0 beta is often, in Mandrake sense, half a year from release. And don't say that they're only KDE. They're GNOME focused as well, and all their configuration apps are written using Gtk.

As you mentioned, 10.0 will be 2.6-based. I'm using 2.6 with Mandrake Cooker (devel) now, and it works good.

I do agree on your point with 9.2. It wasn't very solid. Even bugs in the installer annoyed me.

Hm, selling an ISO? Sounds hard.

Looks impressive... Needs some evangelism...

[sisukapalli1]

Things are really boding well for the linux desktop. I believe one main obstacle is for people to just know about what all can be done with a standard linux distro since there are so many nifty applications (my experience was with KDE and all little utils such as kdirstat).

Here is one example related to the need for evangelism: I have used latex very much, but only now, after killing some time on the net looking at related stuff, did I find information about "texdoc", a sort of a "browser for tex/latex". When I tried to look at texdoc, I found the shell showing texdoc and texdoctk, texdoctk has a GUI and a sort of a comprehensive reference. If it took me so much time to come across such a useful tidbit, imagine how much time it would take for someone that does not even have much interest in exploring. He/she would be stuck with cryptic menus

BTW, Mandrake's 10.0 beta looks impressive (KDE 3.2Pre Linux 2.6.1 (+2.4.25)), and the bittorrent link is at here

S