Mandrake Linux Development Process Changes

joestar writes "Just found at MandrakeLinux.com: 'MandrakeSoft today announced a major evolution in the way that future Mandrake Linux distributions will be engineered and released. The purpose of this new development process is to provide the highest level of new features, as well as maximizing the quality of new products.' In short: for each release, there will be a 'Community' release, equivalent to a common Mandrake release, with all latest features. Several months later an 'Official' release - based on the 'Community' - will be available. Both of them will be released publicly and supported. The new process will start with the upcoming Mandrake 10.0."

Comments

Unit testing.

[Anonymous Coward]

They should use the unit testing development approach with a spice of X-treme programming. Surely then Mandrake will surpass Mac OS X as the leading desktop OS of choice.

Re:Unit testing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I do some "X-treme unit testing" several times a day.

I've got forearms like Popeye. (Well, one, at least...)

Reminds me of something

[lakeland]

Oh yes, fedora... Well, at least they're making the non-community version available, unlike RHAS.

Re:Reminds me of something

[bogie]

First off the source to RHAS is available so feel free to download it and compile it yourself. New distros like Whiteboxlinux have done exactly that. Don't want to compile it or download it from someone who has? Spend your own money on R&D and then make your own distro. You can then give it away for free compiled or do whatever you want with it.

Second, comparing the Mandrake download version with what you get with RHAS is a disingenuous comparison at best. They simply aren't in the same league.

Re:Reminds me of something

[lakeland]

Incidentially, I know somebody who did exactly that with RHAS and libssl didn't work.

But I was comparing the development model, not the quality of the distributions. RedHat releases a 'community' version to people who want something relatively recent. Lets the community fix the bugs and then releases a 'stable' version. Mandrake now does _exactly_ the same.

Re:Reminds me of something

[Nezer]

You're right... For starters the Mandrake model MAKES SENSE!

Wow....

[JoeLinux]

A Business plan based on the actual Open Source community instead of just their products. Wow. I may weep openly.

Joe

so how much

[geekoid]

does the 'community' get for beta testing?
how big is the 'community' compared to the buyers of the 'official' release?

Re:so how much

[autocracy]

Nobody gets paid to use the 2.5 series kernels to prove 2.6 is good. There will always be people out for the latest & greatest... and plenty of whom would not care about being paid.

Re:so how much

[dubdays]

And the great thing about all this is that those who want the bleeding-edge stuff get it, and the others (e.g. newbie, corporate user, etc.) get something that's stable right out of the box. I can see this as being a great way to sort out the bugs before the corporate guys install it and toss it to the side after playing with it for 10 minutes. This way, they get something very stable and usable that could gain widespread use throughout various companies.

Re:so how much

[Anonymous Coward]

How about the 'community' gets FREE SOFTWARE! Duh!!! Of course, those who are unhappy with the high costs of beta testing OSS can always go back to using good old MS products, that will show those greedy Mandrake folks. Whupucka!

Re:so how much

[mickwd]

"[so how much] does the 'community' get for beta testing?"

Everything they produce (including the 'Official' release), downloadable and useable for free.

Re:so how much

[Allnighterking]

What they never got before...... Stable CDs when they buy thier Power Packs.... *sigh* love it love it love it!!!!!

Re:so how much

[Anonymous Coward]

other companys let you buy a huge amount of money to test their prereleases. (e.g. check what ms charges you for testing their betas :P)... people still use it... and the final releases still suck.

regards,
some user ;)

Isn't this what RedHat is doing?

[bc90021]

It seems a little too coincidental that Mandrake (originally a derivative of RedHat) is now switching to the same model as RedHat. RedHat has their "community" version, Fedora, and an "official" version, the Red Hat Enterprise Server.

Re:Isn't this what RedHat is doing?

[linicks]

Well, after the QA problems they had with the last release, it's not that bad of an idea. I was happily running 9.1, and upgraded to 9.2. I was so disappointed with 9.2 I started checking out other distros. At least this way, they will have a higher quality product with the "Official" version.

Re:Isn't this what RedHat is doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

But here the difference is that both versions will be available for free download.

Re:Isn't this what RedHat is doing?

[MysteriousMystery]

Well, the community version of Mandrake is just an early build of the release. Unlike Red Hat, Mandrake is actually releasing the "official" version for public download, as it's stated "after a short delay, Mandrake Linux 10.0 Official Download Edition will be made available on public FTP mirrors". This is a signficiant difference from Red Hat's business model.

Re:Isn't this what RedHat is doing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't folks get it? All Mandrake is doing is:
1. Making the normal release available to non club members.
2. Updating the mirrors with security/bug fixes, etc.
3. Making a second release, first for club members, then for everyone.

In other words, just adding another "super stable" release to the current release cycle.

Re:Isn't this what RedHat is doing?

[lspd]

Don't folks get it? All Mandrake is doing is... In other words, just adding another "super stable" release to the current release cycle.

Right... It looks more like an admission by Mandrake that they are unable to address the QA problems that have plagued their distro for years. Rather than putting even more effort into testing, they're just going to wait for all the major bugs to hit the folks that download before pressing CDs.

It's a good strategy on Mandrake's part since it's cheaper than hiring additional developers, but personally I wouldn't touch the new download version with a ten foot pole.

I wonder how this will affect the 18 month EOL schedule Mandrake announced after RedHat switched to a 12 month EOL schedule.

Re:Isn't this what RedHat is doing?

[ibbey]

"Don't folks get it? All Mandrake is doing is... In other words, just adding another "super stable" release to the current release cycle. "

Right... It looks more like an admission by Mandrake that they are unable to address the QA problems that have plagued their distro for years. Rather than putting even more effort into testing, they're just going to wait for all the major bugs to hit the folks that download before pressing CDs.

What is it with you Mandrake bashers? You're worse then the MS trolls. Mandrake has always been rock-solid for me. I've used it for years. I'm currently running 10.0b1, and even it has been quite stable so far.

The current plan makes perfect sense. Think of it this way. Instead of the current two release levels (stable & dev), you now have three: Stable, very-stable & dev. Very-stable is perfect for users who need a high level of stability, servers, office use, your grandma's system. Stable is great for the average user, possibly a bit more adventurous, but still quite stable. Finally you have dev which is for developers & those who want to be on the bleeding edge.

The reality of developing a distribution the size of Mandrake-- especially one that prides itself on being on the cutting edge-- is that some bugs won't be caught until they reach the wide market of an official release. The same is true of Red Hat as well, but their target market is different. They don't aim to be state-of-the-art, so they may not be bitten quite as often-- Mandrake has already fixed the problems before Red Hat has to deal with it.

Re:Isn't this what RedHat is doing?

[gurumeditationerror]

The current plan makes perfect sense. Think of it this way. Instead of the current two release levels (stable & dev), you now have three: Stable, very-stable & dev. Very-stable is perfect for users who need a high level of stability, servers, office use, your grandma's system. Stable is great for the average user, possibly a bit more adventurous, but still quite stable. Finally you have dev which is for developers & those who want to be on the bleeding edge.

Exactly :-) I'll be using the community version and the official when it gets released but I'll wait until the official version before I distribute it among my not so linux literate friends.

Suits me down to the ground. And who cares if it's similar to Fedora? Just 'cos Red Hat comes up with a great idea it shouldn't be used?

Interesting...

[dubdays]

This is actually similar to what Mandrake (and others) already do. Isn't this kind of like just releasing another release candidate in the alpha-beta-rc-final flow? Still, I like the idea, because there have been numerous times I've purchased the boxed version, and it has had major problems that immediately needed to be patched. This is just a way to better refine the distro before selling it on the shelves.

Re:Interesting...

[mickwd]

There may be a cash-flow advantage, too. Rather than having two "peaks" a year when new releases of the distro come out, they might end up with four, smaller "peaks", with some people going for the initial release, and others waiting for the "Official" release (if a significant number of people pay for the "download" edition CDs/DVDs, that is).

For a business, a smoother cash flow has got to be good. The Mandrake Club might also help with this.

Overall, I think it's a great idea.

Is this going to help?

[jared_hanson]

Here is the problem I see with this. They are trying to have their "Official" release be less buggy than recent releases. They claim that the problems with the recent releases are because not enough gets ironed out in the betas.

So, they are breaking the final release into "Community" and "Official" branches. Won't the "Community" release eventually become synonomous with "beta." In the end, fewer people will run this community release, and fewer bugs will be found in it. If this happens, problems will undoubtedly creep into the "Official" release and only be found then because more people are running it.

Anyway, it seems to me they are just trying to rename the word "beta," which is not a solution to the problem they are trying to fix.

Re:Is this going to help?

[Richard_at_work]

How many people run Fedora? How many people run Debian Sid, Debian Sarge? Just because its a "beta" doesnt mean it wont attract a crowd.

Re:Is this going to help?

[Apostata]

quote: Won't the "Community" release eventually become synonomous with "beta." In the end, fewer people will run this community release, and fewer bugs will be found in it. If this happens, problems will undoubtedly creep into the "Official" release and only be found then because more people are running it.

Hmmmmn...no. It actually fits well with the make-up of the Mandrake community. People who want bleeding-edge, but who don't want to contend with open bugs, can use the Community version. People who want the latest but well-tested versions of software can then grab the Official version when it's released. Bug reports will obviously be fewer in the Community release than in the Beta/RC pre-releases, and - on paper at least - the Official release will probably be pretty squeaky-clean.

Re:Is this going to help?

[MysteriousMystery]

Well, the way I look at it is that they are trying to make the "Official" release more stable though it will probably have the downside of being "older" technology then in newer distro's. The Official version will be availble for public download shortly after it's available to club members so I don't see this as a big deal. With regards to the "renaming beta", the community version will likely be "as tested" as their recently releases which many have complained have some stability problems (I personally have noticed any) and the "official" version is aimed to be a rock solid release. That's at least what I am interpreting. This doesn't mean the community release is a beta, it's just not going to be as throughly tested as the "official" version will be. I also assume the official version will have extra software (ala the power pack).

Re:Is this going to help?

[joib]

Hmm, you have a point. There is of course a risk that there will be fewer users of the community release than with the current release as some people will choose to wait until the official release.

Anyway, they will have a couple of months of extra freeze time to iron out the bugs. It would kinda defeat the whole purpose of it, if they would make major upgrades to the packages in the time between the community and official releases, now wouldn't it?

Re:Is this going to help?

[jmania]

The big difference between a beta and the Mandrake Linux community is that people who will use the Mandrake Linux community will be sure that it will be maintained (ie have updates and ability to upgrade their system).

Re:Is this going to help?

[ninjaz]

I think Mandrake's proposition is great, personally. I even suggested just this a while back: Re: Quality Impact?

One of the main things I like about Mandrake is the up-to-dateness of everything in a standard release. I disagree about it being a renamed beta. After all, a beta can (and does) have changing versions the included software prior to release. Also, with betas, you're using software that is subject to serious change without much suport going from point A to point B. From what it looks like, this will be more like the FreeBSD -release branch, where only bugfixes and security updates are made to the previous release. And, there is a continual update path - just apply the update packages and you're there. No need to run the installer to install/upgrade each time as with a new beta.

I think this move helps reconcile the differences between catering to people like me, who use Mandrake at home and don't mind a few rough edges here and there (which I didn't even notice this time around) in order to get the latest and greatest with serious computing environments (i.e., servers) that need stable, tested software in order to effectively serve their purposes.

I think no matter what amount of pre-release testing they put into a release, it won't become seriously stable until it has been in the wild serving real-world needs. This just acknowledges that reality and solidifies it into a process.

Re:Is this going to help?

[red floyd]

Yeah, I thought of the Debian model as well.

Stable == Official
Unstable == Community
Testing == Cooker

Re:Is this going to help?

[red floyd]

Attention Debian Users:

If I mixed up Unstable and Testing, please do not flame me, just post a single correction.

Thank you.

Re:Is this going to help?

[hitmark]

nah, community will be more like unstable while official becomes more like stable in the debian world (cooker will as allways be testing or sid if you like)...

Re:Is this going to help?

[gl4ss]

you would be amazed how much not having a 'beta' label on it can help to get people using it.

heck, look at debians 'unstable', thousands of possible users won't touch it because they think their computers would explode with it or that it wouldn't stay up for more than 15 minutes at a time. yet it is pretty stable and pumps out pretty new software that runs quite reliably(very reliably).

Re:Is this going to help?

[bhtooefr]

I read your post, and I realized: that's what they're doing, except it's the club members who get the updated ISOs. I personally think that if it's a showstopping problem (for example, the LG drive bug), they NEED to release the fix in an updated ISO TO THE PUBLIC.

Re:Is this going to help?

[ninjaz]

I agree - with a problem of the magnitude of the LG drive bug, The Right Thing is to pull all the old ISOs and replace them with fixed ones. I'm disappointed by Mandrake tying this to Club Membership. Even though it wasn't technically their problem, it's bad karma (and, I'd even say bad business) to knowingly leave users exposed to that risk.

Re:Is this going to help?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if I am anonymous, mod this up:

Stable == Official (Yes!)
(WRONG!!!):
Unstable == Community
Testing == Cooker
It should read:
Unstable = Cooker
Testing = Community

Re:Is this going to help?

[shfted!]

I was just about to flame you, silly git.

Yes, you did mix them up.

Re:Is this going to help?

[Anonymous Coward]

mod this down. parent nicely admitted his error above

Re:Is this going to help?

[sciencewhiz]

Shouldn't that be

Stable = Official
Testing = Community
Unstable = Cooker

Re:Wait a minute?

[chadm1967]

What the hell does that have to do with the way Mandrake develops its distribution?

OT,but someone has to make the [NO CARRIER] joke

[Anonymous Coward]

I use mandrake because of its superior networking capabil=20 ]} } } }&..}=3Dr}'}"}[NO CARRIER]

Idea

[BradleyUffner]

They could do something way far out there and call the community release something like a "beta version", and, well... you get the idea

Re:Idea

[midav]

They do already. Mandrake 10 beta 1 ISOs available for club members

Re:Idea

[mod_parent_down]

No, they do, I downloaded it a couple weeks back and tried installing it. Didn't even detect my Logitech USB wheelmouse upon starting installation. I mean, "Beta"? For real?

2 Gigs over a slow DSL connection and 3 coasters... I would definitely recommend waiting for a "Final" community release before even bothering to try participating.

Re:Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the humor was lost on you. If you think about it really hard I'm sure you'll get it.

Re:Idea

[ErixTr]

Mandrake 10 beta 1 ISOs available for club members

Not only for club members but everyone.

Great move!

[joestar]

Once again, Mandrake listened to its community of users and developpers, and I think that this is a great move for Mandrake to offer an excellent level of feature and innovation in its new releases, as well as an excellent level of polishment in a second time... And another good news is that both versions will be officially supported!

I think it's a very smart understanding of a community project, and I think Mandrake can be thanked for its continued sense of innovation since 1998...

After the recent and excellent financial from MandrakeSoft, this is all good news!

Re:Great move!

[frission]

the only problem i have is that the "community" sounds like people that are paying to subscribe to mandrake. if so, wouldn't you want as many possible "beta" testers as possible (ie free distro), not just to the few people that subscribe to the mandrake community? Anyway, maybe it's just me, but that's what it sounded like. It was like "hey, you pay for your subscription to get to the stuff early...but it's buggy, once you figure out the problems, everyone else gets it free in 2-3 months."

Re:Great move!

[miyako]

One of us misunderstood what is going on here, and it could be me, but from what I understand it goes something like this:
Mandrake: Hey community, here is the community version, try it it out, it's pretty stable, we've beta tested it and everything.
Community: Hey, there are bugs X,Y and Z here
Mandrake: Oh, our bad, well we fixed all those bugs and updated the security patches, you subscribers can go ahead and download the new version while we are getting the cds stamped and the manuals printed.
*Boxed set arrives in stores*
Mandrake: Ok, the boxed set is out now, it would be really neat if you could go buy it, but we'll let you download it too.

Re:Wait a minute?

[RazzleFrog]

Apparently you can link to an article but not read it. They are filing under the French equivalent of Chapter 11 - Reorg. During the process the company MUST continue to do business because they still have to pay debtors. Otherwise they would have filed the equivalent of Chapter 7 - liquidation.

Mandrake Linux Development Process Changes

[Anonymous Coward]

Mandrake Linux Development Process Changes

So the dude who used to copy-paste kernel source code got fired from SCO, eh?

Mandrake missed the boat already..

[pair-a-noyd]

I don't dislike Mandrake but after a year and a half I decided to try Suse 9.0 Pro and I'm glad I did. It works, right out of the box.

Mandrake, otoh, was a constant struggle to get all the features to function properly.
It was OK for someone that never fiddles with their system, I have a friend using MDK 9.1 and it's fine for him but he does very little with it. For heavy duty users, it's a battle.

My money now goes to Suse..
Matter of fact, I'm looking into becoming a Suse VAR..

Re:Mandrake missed the boat already..

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the EXACT opposite experience. I like Suse 9.0, but Mandrake 9.2 just worked, right out of the box.

What causes such a disparity? Differences in our respective hardware?

Re:Mandrake missed the boat already..

[bhtooefr]

I had a different experience. I used SuSE 8.2, which seemed pretty good out of the box (well, ethernet cable), but once I pushed it (a weird wifi card, Samba printer, and various RPMs), it didn't hold up. I never did finish getting the WiFi card, but I got the Samba printer. Many RPMs just plain didn't work, and some had dependencies that I KNEW I had satisfied, but didn't take. Even some from SuSE's own package list segfaulted (FlightGear). Mandrake? It FELT worse out of the box, and didn't seem very newbie-friendly, but everything worked, even though it was haphazard.

Re:Mandrake missed the boat already..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had no problems with Mandrake since I've been using it (all the way back to 8.0).

Re:Mandrake missed the boat already..

[steve_l]

WLANs seem inconsistent trouble all round. To get RH9.0 working with the built in WLAN card, I had to take it to JJ Tourhille (he of the wireless kernel patches) and get him to set it up -and even then it locks up every half hour. Whereas the wireless PC card just plug and plays, with auto find-and-bind to hotspots.

I guess some of this is driver related, but things like that make a big difference. Your point about newbie-ness still holds though; I felt the installer was overhard and took me four reinstalls before everything went smoothly.

Re:Mandrake missed the boat already..

[bhtooefr]

This was actually a Linksys Cardbus card, it's just it was a rtl8180, which meant I had to recompile my kernel (I had to do that to get proper ACPI support, though). I never did recompile it - I didn't know what SuSE compiled it with, and at the time I had Windows to boot into (I think the registry got borked somehow).

What this really is

[Gyorg_Lavode]

Honestly, it sounds like they are renaming the unstable version in order to get more user testing. It sounds like the idea is to produce a user version based on updated packages but w/o the rigorious testing demanded by companies.

I honestly don't think it sounds like that bad an idea. Most home users don't need the testing and would like the features. With easy updating most home users can afford to use a less tested package. And for those who do not like the idea, they can wait for the official release. It gives them a situation akin to Debian's unstable/stable development where the stable branch is solid but aged, and the unstable branch is usable but current.

Re:What this really is

[leviramsey]

And since, unlike debian, stable releases will be regular (probably two per year), stable will actually be sort of current!

Re:What this really is

[bhtooefr]

Thing is, what Mandrake's calling stable now will become testing level. Basically, right now, they take Cooker, work the bugs out, and get Official. What they're going to do, is take Cooker, work the bugs out, get Community (same level as old Official), work some more bugs out, and release Official.

Here's how it's going to match up:

Cooker's going to stay Cooker, and it's equivalent is Debian Unstable if you're looking at the Debian model.
Official is going to become Community. It's about at Debian Testing level.
A new level will be called Official, and it'll be roughly equivalent to Debian Stable (except more up to date - who would think of using a 2.2 kernel nowadays?)

It's not the same at all

[joestar]

1) Both Mandrake Linux Community and Mandrake Linux Official versions will be publicly released and supported.

2) Fedora is in fact the same as the Mandrake Cooker project, which started... 5 years ago.

So I'm afraid that *Mandrake* is innovating with this new scheme. Red Hat is just leaving its users alone...

Re:It's not the same at all

[Syberghost]

Red Hat is just leaving its users alone...

Yes, leaving them alone. By hosting servers, paying employees to work on Fedora, and spending lots of other money on the project.

I feel so alone. Hold me.

Re:It's not the same at all

[joestar]

> Yes, leaving them alone. By hosting servers,
> paying employees to work on Fedora, and spending
> lots of other money on the project.

Nice joke :-}

Re:It's not the same at all

[jmv]

Fedora is in fact the same as the Mandrake Cooker

No. Fedora is like Mandrake releases, though I think it also has a cooker-style release.

Re:It's not the same at all

[joestar]

I didn't know Fedora was officially supported by Red Hat.

Re:It's not the same at all

[Anonymous Coward]

"I feel so alone. Hold me."

See if you aren't saying the same thing minus the sarcasm in six months.

Re:It's not the same at all

[bogie]

From the Fedora Release Notes

"An Introduction to the Fedora Project

The Fedora Project is a Red Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project."

"For more information, refer to the Fedora Project website:

http://fedora.redhat.com/"

Re:It's not the same at all

[pyros]

2) Fedora is in fact the same as the Mandrake Cooker project, which started... 5 years ago.

Assuming my assumption that Cooker is an ever-changing set of newly created packages which have not been tested/approved/released is correct, than Cooker is the same as Red Hat's Rawhide, which has been around for quite a few years itself, the exact number of which I don't know. Neither Cooker nor Rawhide should in any way be considered actual releasable distributions.

Fedora is not remotely like either of these. It has official, numbered releases, complete with a dev./QA schedule and has bugfix/security patches released for it.

Re:It's not the same at all

[jmania]

That's partially true.

Cooker was from the begining available in real time on Internet (mirrored every hour) with a transparent development scheme (CVS, mailing list, changelog altert) while Rawhide was only available from time to time and with no transparency.

Additionnaly Cooker is useable. There is many people who are using it on their Desktop. This make the strenght of the system.

Re:It's not the same at all

[jmv]

Well, that's about the only difference. Anyway, what I mostly meant is that Fedora stability is that of a release, not a beta/community release.

Re:It's not the same at all

[pyros]

while Rawhide was only available from time to time

I've never seen Rawhide unavailable. I've seen it not work, but it's always been available. I've seen plenty of instances of some packages having up to 4 different versions in Rawhide at one time. It's truly nothing more than a collection of binary packages. Red Hat was just kind enough to wrap it in the official installation CD layout on their ftp server, so you can do FTP install's of it.

Re:It's not the same at all

[Anonymous Coward]

well redhat get's enough testers of the test releases and their engineering has been of a quality that have not put out horrible releases. the only fiasco in terms of poor releases was really gcc-2.96. other things that people have complained about, unicode perl, and even gcc-2.96 was overblown and mostly third party breakage, which is fine, as progress slows down for no one...

Re:It's not the same at all

[Afrosheen]

Community release != beta release. It's a finished OS, and Mandrake 10 is currently in beta. The way Mandrake normally does it goes something like this:

1. Release beta 1 through 4
2. Release release candidates 1 through 4
3. Final release.

The process is usually around 6 months or so. There is a cooker freeze that takes place at some point during the process where all new packages get locked into a specific version number. This cuts down on problems later in the beta testing phases.

By summer Mandrake 10 should be available since beta 1 has already hit the net. When the distro is ready, mdk10 will allow ISO downloads to club members FIRST, while everything is available via ftp mirrors. Next comes the shipping boxed sets, finally a box set on store shelves and freely downloadable ISOs. The boxed set/iso downloading scheme is new and while some people have complained, it's really in Mandrake's best interests to do it this way.

Re:It's not the same at all

[fucksl4shd0t]

When the distro is ready, mdk10 will allow ISO downloads to club members FIRST, while everything is available via ftp mirrors. Next comes the shipping boxed sets, finally a box set on store shelves and freely downloadable ISOs. The boxed set/iso downloading scheme is new and while some people have complained, it's really in Mandrake's best interests to do it this way.

I'm not sure I completely understand what you said, but your summary of how they used to do it is correct.

If you recall, and I waited breathlessly through this (I really wanted to upgrade to 9.2 so I could get a decent rpm of the 2.6 kernel), they had a serious problem with certain CD drives that mis-used the atapi protocol and got their firmware erased the first time you used them. This was a very serious problem, and they had to yank the release until it was resolved. While they had the release yanked, thousands (millions?) of people just like me waited, and waited, and waited some more. They probably already had sent 9.2 to the presses to get printed and pressed and distributed and had to stop that in a hurry, and there's no telling how much money they lost in the deal because of this.

So, what they're doing now looks like a way to deal with this problem and others like it in the future. What's different is that they'll make the regular release just like they used to, and they'll make the isos available for download, just like they used to. But they won't produce the boxed sets for a couple more months while the rest of us install it and find all the bugs that slipped through. Then they fix those bugs, make their boxed set, and make their "Official" release.

As far as I'm concerned, I think this is great. They really got a bad rap over the last release, and it's an awesome release (I'm using it right now!). It kicks the ass out of RedHat 9, which I used a few months back. It really fuckin' rocks, man, it rocks. Dude! So we who like to freeload (still poor, otherwise I'd've joined the MandrakeClub a long time ago) still get our download release that'll be just as good as it always is at the regular time we expect it to be available, and they get to release a boxed set that really rocks, because it won't have the stupid bugs that appeared right after the "release". So now we get two releases, one that's great with a few stupid bugs that crept through (damn those bugs that always make it through!), and one that's great without all the stupid bugs that crept through.

So, in conclusion, I, for one, welcome our new Mandrake overlords.

Re:It's not the same at all

[Anonymous Coward]

You, or the one he told?

New version strings:

[HungWeiLo]

Beta -> Alpha
Community edition -> Beta
Official edition -> Release version

It just means people will wait out until the Official Release is available. This will not have a significant impact on defect reduction based on higher rates of beta testing.

Re:New version strings:

[Apostata]

quote: It just means people will wait out until the Official Release is available. This will not have a significant impact on defect reduction based on higher rates of beta testing.

No, it just means that you're incapable of looking at it from the perspective of anyone who uses Mandrake.

Re:New version strings:

[gmhowell]

It just means people will wait out until the Official Release is available.

Exactly. Because NOBODY uses Debian testing. (Of course, to have anything remotely current, you kinda have to use Debian testing. That incentive doesn't exist for Mandrake users.)

Re:New version strings:

[stangbat]

If only Via would be this honest.

KT133 -> Beta
KT133A -> Stable Release Version

KT266 -> Beta
KT266A -> Stable Release Version

KT400 -> Beta
KT400A -> I think you get the picture by now.

Re:New version strings:

[Anonymous Coward]

Beta -> Alpha -> Sid
Community edition -> Beta -> Sarge
Official edition -> Release version -> Woody

ahhh. i knew i had seen this stuff before...what is old is new again.

Redhat and Mandrake have come up with a "new" way...uh huh. and my grandma invented cookies and milk.

Translation for the short-attention-span-equipped

[SuperBanana]

announced a major evolution in the way that future Mandrake Linux distributions will be engineered and released. The purpose of this new development process is to provide the highest level of new features, as well as maximizing the quality of new products.' In short: for each release, there will be a 'Community' release, equivalent to a common Mandrake release, with all latest features. Several months later an 'Official' release - based on the 'Community' - will be available.

Translation from Long Marketingspeak: We'll take Cooker and freeze it, and then a couple months later, after we've fixed everything, it will be released. By which time it will be completely outdated, of course...and you won't be able to install (insert KDE or GNOME package here) because it needs version 3.4.2.5.34, not 3.4.2.5.33...you'll have to wait for the NEXT release(which will be unusable of course until -it- is sorted) to get .34....

Boy, they're right, that does sound nicer :-)

That's a nice chance !

[denisbergeron]

It will be a better and smoother process.
I always want to convince my self to buy a Mandrake pack, but I can have it free :-)
Now, I will have a reason :-)

Anyway, I hope, they will find a way to upgrade application for end user more easy that the current shame. I never able to upgrade the mozilla 1.4 of the 9.2 to the new Mozilla 1.6 with scapping a reverence to XZY !

This isn't really new

[MysteriousMystery]

This isn't really new, outside of the changing of the "cooker" system all of this was announced earlier. Anyway, outside of faster updates the only major difference between the community version and the regular version of Mandrake appears to just be extra software bundled with the regular version. I don't see the community release as a "beta" exactly as a lot of others on this thread seem to percieve it as.

If you can't beat them, join them?

[joeytsai]

It's interesting to see the different distributions slowly moving towards Debian's release policies. My question for the Fedora and now Mandrake is, why not utilize a very organized and effective "community" that exists right now of free software developers?

Certainly Debian's release schedule could be improved, but Debian is hard to beat in "stuff just working" when it is released.

Re:If you can't beat them, join them?

[Shivaji Maharaj]

Infact I have migrated to debian to avoid the frequent updates that I was tempted to ( just because it was available ) in qw ( gentoo, mandrake, fedora ).

A couple of months back - I was with slackware very happy - but got tried compiling everything from source.

I am very much happy that debian is not releasing so often other than the security updates.

Re:If you can't beat them, join them?

[jmania]

Mandrakesoft have created the cooker system since 1999 which is well organized with multiple tools (changelog, cvs, wiki, etc).

The difference between the Debian release cycle and the Mandrake release cycle is that Mandrake is much faster to include new features/easy to install. This idea behind this new process is to add an additional cycle with a stable branch. So increase the stability while keeping the cutting edge.

Re:If you can't beat them, join them?

[IANAAC]

It's interesting to see the different distributions slowly moving towards Debian's release policies.

My first thought was that they were going Redhat's biz model, not Debian's. I immediately thought "OK... how long before they start charging more for the polished version?". Paranoid? Perhaps, but I have Redhat to thank for getting me to think it.

Re:If you can't beat them, join them?

[ninjaz]

It's interesting to see the different distributions slowly moving towards Debian's release policies. My question for the Fedora and now Mandrake is, why not utilize a very organized and effective "community" that exists right now of free software developers?

I think the problem with this scenario is that Debian's developers do what they want to, and can't just be "utilized" by a company. From what I saw in my years as a Debian user, Debian is more developer-oriented than user-oriented. For instance, NMU (non-maintainer updates) were a touchy subject, while a company like Mandrake is free to fix any package they want in official repository without ruffling feathers.

Of course, Debian developers are free to work on Mandrake Cooker as well... And, the distributions that are based on Debian exist, too. So far, I haven't noticed being Debian-based as a clear advantage in the marketplace, though. I don't see any real benefits of Mandrake shadowing Debian, personally.

Yes, some packages would be maintained well for no cost, but at the pace of, and in the style of the owning developer. Otherwise, Mandrake would have to maintain their own version, anyway. That could lead to working around Debian being far more work than just doing what they want to begin with.

For me as a user, that point was reached when Debian was still working on XFree86 4.1 months after the release of XFree86 4.2. My video card died, and after confirming with XFree86.org that I was getting a supported card and buying it, I noticed it required XFree86 4.2. XFree86 4.2 was not yet a part of Debian ... not even in unstable, or on Branden's site. Meanwhile, Mandrake had already shipped with XFree86 4.2.

In such a situation, for Mandrake to release an updated XFree86 (or any core component, really) ahead of Debian proper, they would need to update and test each package depending X themselves.

Then they would be in the situation I mentioned above - having separate trees and trying to work with the official package maintainers to roll in their updates. All of that would burn through time which, imho, would be better spent building a distribution instead of fixing one.

Version 10.0

[Samuel Duncan]

This version inflation gets really on my nerves.
Huge numbers like 10.0 don't mean anything anymore. They want to suggest that the product is mature, well working and has lots of features.
But usually this isn't true. And the irony is that even Mandrake uses this numbering scheme. This makes it basically an oxymoron.
The only mature and stable distribution is usually Debian. But it is so mature that it even stinks.

Re:Version 10.0

[geekoid]

so your sayting its version 2?

or perhaps 8? 16?

dear god, somebody tell me the base!!!

You want to tlka about version inflation? how about windows 2000? now THATS version inflating.

THANKS YOU, I'LL BE HEAR ALL WEEK! don't for get to give some karma to the wait staff!

Re:Version 10.0

[Afrosheen]

Mandrake typically increments version numbers yearly, as a reflection of the serious updates the distro receives.

The transition from 9.2 to 10 is a major one. Included will be kde 3.2 and kernel 2.6.x. Mandrake 9.2 has kde 3.1.3 and kernel 2.4.22-10mdk. The step up from kernel 2.4 to 2.6 warrants a new version number in Mandrake's methodology.

I've run Mandrake since version 6.5 and this is how they've always done it. Each year gets a new version. Once you understand it, it makes sense. From a purely linux standpoint it looks stupid, I know.

Re:Version 10.0

[dildatron]

What would you propose? I think worthless version number skips are dumb, like jumping from version 2 to 8 for no other reason, but what's wrong with going to version 10 from version 9? Version 10 will likely have a kernel version 2.6.x, up from 2.4.x, so what's wrong with going to the next number when a major change takes place (like a new kernel)?

It's for the money....

[SailFly]

I think it's a way of getting people to join the Mandrake Community which is not very expensive anyway. I see it as a gentle nudge for those who actively use Mandrake and want immediate access to new releases. It really is for a good cause. I support their decision as I use their Linux distro on many customer sites.

The main change here...

[tverbeek]

...as far as I can tell, is that they're adding a "gamma testing" phase between the open-beta-test phase of the Cooker process, and the official put-it-in-boxes-and-call-it-done release. Seems like a reasonable move, because it lets users be a little more granular in deciding just how bleeding-edge or risk-averse they want to be with new versions.

Re:The main change here...

[Akai]

I agree. They're not doing (as has been accused here) this:
Old New
Alpha Beta
Beta Community
Stable Official

what they are doing is adding a cycle after the release "goes gold", which to me is an excelent idea.

They basiually did the same thing for Mandrake Club members where they took 9.2 and all the errata and did a 9.2.1 ISO release.

This truely provides the best of both worlds. If you want the latest kung fu, and can deal with a few bumps and bruises, go for it, but if you're waiting for enlightenement (not the window manager), wait for the Official, which might be a bit behind, but will have the last of the bugs hammered out of it.

Re:The main change here...

[Afrosheen]

Another way to put it, as I'm planning, is the Community is what's going on my desktop, and the Official is what's going on my servers.

Read the PR...

[joestar]

If you read the PR, the Mandrake Community version will be exactly the same as a regular Mandrake Linux release. No more, no less, and their goal is to have the Official version totally polished/bug free... I'm not as pessimistic as you are!

Re:Read the PR...

[kfg]

Right, they aren't renaming the beta. They're creating a whole new phase that comes after beta and Release Candidate.

Otherwise known as the "Hey, if it blows up your CD drive it doesn't count unless it's labeled "Official." File a bug report" version.

I hope I live long enough to someday see a "Stick a fork in it, it's Done" version. I don't mean an end to development. Just a version that at least works as intended, rather than works as designed.

KFG

Re:Read the PR...

[Lehk228]

not their fault fucking idiot hardware manufacturers use a command for something other than it's intended purpose

Re:Read the PR...

[kfg]

As it happens I agree entirely.

KFG

Re:OT,but someone has to make the [NO CARRIER] jok

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow; your build was actually able to detect, configure, and use a Windows software modem for more than 45 seconds? Kudos to you.

Re:Wait a minute?

[Anonymous Coward]

"According to the press release issued by MandrakeSoft earlier today, the schedule for Mandrake Linux 9.1 should stay on course. Incidentally, the first beta of that release was made available last week to those interested in previewing the system's new upgrades."

isn't this old news as mandrake has already released 9.2?

Fedora = Cooker...

[joestar]

And Mandrake Cooker is 5 years old. Both Fedora & Cooker are experimental and quite buggy Linux distributions. The new Mandrake development scheme is an extention/evolution of this process, but you cannot compare it to Fedora. If you really need to compare it to something else, compare it to Debian stable/unstable branches...

Re:Fedora = Cooker...

[00420]

I actually used Fedora for a couple months without any problems. I'm sure it's buggy in certain applications, but for my uses it was superb. It just wasn't up-to-date enough for my tastes, so I switched to Gentoo.

Re:Fedora = Cooker...

[leviramsey]

Cooker has generally been about as bleeding edge as Gentoo...

Re:Fedora = Cooker...

[Anonymous Coward]

and not nearly as gay.

Re:Fedora = Cooker...

[rollingrock]

Fedora != Cooker Rawhide = Cooker

Re:Fedora = Cooker...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cooker is bleeding edge.
Fedora has months of beta testing.
these are not the same thing.

Different than Fedora

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

It's a bit more like Debian than RedHat's model I think. The Community release will be functionally complete, but has bugs.. i.e Beta. The Official release will be the Community Release put through a QA process which seems to depend heavily on feedback from Community users. This is pretty much how I've seen Debian handle it's stable/unstable branches, although I'll admit I pay less attention to the Debian dev process than RedHat's.

Personally, I think it's not a bad model for getting higher quality on a shoestring. I don't think Mandrake is out of the deep water yet, so I definately commend their ability to find innovative solutions to providing higher quality in their products.

Fedora seems to be a sort of less public version of this policy. Fedora (Community) users add features and test the Beta quality software. The cream is incorporated into RH products and put through traditional QA testing, which is probably a much larger operation than what Mandrake can muster.

Just my 0.0160900 EUR on the announcement.

Re:Different than Fedora

[theantix]

It's a bit more like Debian than RedHat's model I think.

So we have to wait another 2 years before Mandrake 10.0 comes out?

Sounds more debian-ish than redhat-ish

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Mandrake user, I'm glad to see a change like this come along. It sounds similar, though not exactly the same, as the various debian branches. Hopefully good things will come of this, though the overall idea sounds pretty positive.

um...

[Honor]

...well, mandrakelinux.com may have "just found out about it" but slashdot knew way back on January 22nd...

Surprise

[fredrikj]

The purpose of this new development process is to provide the highest level of new features, as well as maximizing the quality of new products.

I'm glad this was clarified. One might have thought the opposite.

But..

[ikekrull]

Their previous strategy of just shovelling packages onto the CDs and not even bothering to test if they worked together was going so well.

I mean really, who *doesn't* want to spend a week identifying and ironing out all the bugs, and downloading several hundred megabytes of patches as soon as you install Mandrake Linux?

Surely thats part of the 'Mandrake user experience' that makes it such a wonderful product.

Great move for Mandrake

[clusterix]

Having been disappointed many times with the 'release' quality of Mandrake (but loving their attempts at ease of use) I think this is a great solution. It is obvious that their rpm catalog needs much more work than what it is currently getting (especially for big version updates), this should iron out the bugs and make a superior product when it is ready to ship CDs to off-the-shelf first time users and nonhacker corporations.

Hopefully this will finally make Mandrake suitable for corporate use (since Redhat Enterprise did the same thing against regular Redhat and now Fedora and Debian does a similar but MUCH slower version).

I hope that source based distros start to find a similar solution ie. Gentoo and Gentoo"Stable" (well mirrored and tested) so that they can reach a more mission critical set of users. I use ROCK Linux and they have been trying and failing to bridge this gap. It is important especially if distro makers want big contracts.

Isn't this the same as mozilla?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this the same process as mozilla?

Mozilla has nightly versions where the features are added.
Then they have the milestone releases. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3
Then they have the "stable" releases. 1.0 & 1.4

The people who want stable and don't care about all the latest and greatest features (like embeddors) use 1.0 and 1.4. End users on the other hand probably want to be using 1.6.

Smart move by Mandrake

[Krafty Koder]

This is a very smart move by Mandrake. The Cooker idea worked well, but it was never officially promoted in a big way i.e. you never hit the Mandrake home page and saw "Cooker release 9.2 available for download"

Dare I say, but it sounds very like the Debian way of doing things (unstable - testing - stable).

But there's a double-edged sword with doing things this way , in that you'll never have the bleeding edge stuff in a "Community" Mandrake release.

But then, if you want that ,you must know what you are doing - and you'll just end up using Cooker anyway.

imho,the Community thing is more aimed at the general casual Linux user - a bit experienced ,but not experienced enough to compile their own kernels. And that's a good thing - more exposure to a wider range of platforms and better bug feedback.

As an example on why they had to introduce this (possibly), the much advertised MandrakeMove Live CD doesnt even recognise some PCMCIA wireless cards in laptops. A bad oversight.

A MandrakeMove community edition would have helped in identifying this glaring omission.

Overall, it's a big big thumbs up from myself - well done Mandrake for introducing the Community Edition idea.

Mandrake...

[AvengerXP]

Radical change? What, are they going to manufacture their OS in 0.10 micron? Wait wait i'm confused.

Take this, Rev. Moon!

[Apostata]

quote: It's interesting to see the different distributions slowly moving towards Debian's release policies. My question for the Fedora and now Mandrake is, why not utilize a very organized and effective "community" that exists right now of free software developers?

Probably because we don't want to end up sounding like brain-washed Debian sycophants.

Re:DEAR ENGLAND, YUO = TEH SUCK

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there any Brits posting here that are not complete assholes?

Pay for Linux...

[humandoing]

How many /. type folx are actually paying for linux distributions these days? I'm not seeking flamebait, but just curious. With distro's like Mandrake, Suse, and Redhat all starting to charge some cash for their production releases, are more people starting to look to alternatives such as Gentoo and Debian? Are others starting to scrap the idea of Linux and move to OSX?

What gets you stoked about Linux? The price tag? Quality? Security? or the fact that it isn't M$.

I'd be willing to pay for a distro like SuSE (or whatever) if I knew that the quality was uber-superb. But even my latest go-round with RedHat 9 has left me fairly unimpressed... Maybe I just love OS X too much?

Re:Pay for Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are others starting to scrap the idea of Linux and move to OSX?

Sure. Instead of paying $40 for a copy of Red Hat, they'll spend four figures on a system to run OS X.

Re:Pay for Linux...

[Dr. Shim]

I don't pay for Linux stuff, mainly because I don't think it's worth it for me. I mean, there's no real benefit. Anything I can buy from SuSe for $5,000 I can get for free by downloading it.

Heck, get Debian, and apt-get all the software that comes with those SuSE purchases. OK, so some of it is actual retail software, but I still don't see any real benefit.

And besides, I really don't do all my work on my Linux machine. I have a lot of software that requires Windows. Music production/remixing software, photo editing, and a decent HTML editor, ect.

And I am trying to familurize myself with both platforms. I do .NET here, then Perl/PHP there, ect. I have MSSQL 2000, and MySQL 4. So, if it's cheaper for me to download, I'll download. But if I had the money to donate to something like Debian, I really would. I think it's a worthy cause. Besides, what they're doing is cool!

Re:Pay for Linux...

[jzarling]

I dont mind paying a few bucks for Linux. A couple of bucks for the ISOs is better than say 200 for the pretty box.

Re:Pay for Linux...

[Zordas]

I switched to Gentoo about 1 year ago and I have to say it great. I compile everything from scratch using my custom gcc settings. This way I have ALL the new stuff and my linux box is compiled specifically for my chipsets.

Re:Pay for Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether it's worth paying for depends on the distro, I guess. I was happy with Red Hat 8 and 9, and didn't know what I was missing until I played around with Suse 9. I ended up buying Suse 9 pro, because it supports hardware Red Hat doesn't, defaults to KDE instead of Gnome, and it was so much easier installing everything I wanted from the one DVD, instead of dealing with the usual 3 CD-ROMS (downloaded at the cost of about 2 hours per disk), then downloading the other programs I wanted to use from the net.

Suse itself is so much easier to configure than Red Hat, and feels so much more polished, that I really do think it's worth supporting with your wallet.

Re:Pay for Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you download the Live cd from SuSE and see for yourself if it's worth it?
SuSE professional is something like 80 bucks, not very much compared to the more than $1000 you would have to pay for a decent Mac.

Re:Pay for Linux...

[Halthar]

Personally at home I use Gentoo and what amounts to a something similar to LFS (My own mongrel distro). At work I use Gentoo on my Linux machine.

However, I also buy a retail versions of the various distros, when I can, even if I never actually install them. I want to see the companies pushing Linux succeed so I put up some cash. I also contribute where I can to keep the projects I use the most going.

It may be somewhat stupid to buy something I never use, but I see it more as an investment than simply a purchase.

Re:Pay for Linux...

[RedBear]

What gets you stoked about Linux? The price tag? Quality? Security? or the fact that it isn't M$.

I'd like to answer that question: Yes. ;)

Re:Pay for Linux...

[darnok]

Although I switched to Debian some time back, I still buy every 2nd or 3rd Mandrake release and keep it on the shelf. Of all the for-pay distributions, I like Mandrake's model the best and I think there'd be a big hole in the desktop market in particular if Mandrake was to disappear.

The reason I switched to Debian was Knoppix. The hardware detection is that good; the install time is tiny; the products on the CD are pretty close to the full set of what I want.

The reason I use Linux is the fact that, when I install it, it just works and keeps on working. My experience is that a Windows desktop has a working life of about 6 months; after that, you're faced with a box that runs slower and slower and more and more problems are occurring. The only way of fixing that is to reinstall it, which consumes about 2 days by the time you've installed every app, every service pack and found every serial number (note: we're talking home PCs here). I've got a Linux file server that's run essentially unchanged except for disc upgrades and security patches since 1998, and has never once given me a problem - that simply doesn't happen with Windows boxes.

Installing a Linux box is a breeze these days. From bare metal, I can get a Linux desktop box installed and fully working *with all applications* within about 1-2 hours. For servers, it's often less. If necessary, I can then kick off an apt-get upgrade, come back in an hour or so, reboot and the box is operational. From bare metal, unless you're installing from an image, it takes many more hours sitting in front of a Windows system to install apps and service packs. I hate that I have to keep clicking "OK" or typing in serial numbers, so I can't wander off and do something else while the box installs. If you've got e.g. Ghost, you're covered to some extent, although then you hit problems if your hardware config is significantly different from that used for the Ghost image.

I like the fact that my Linux boxes never have downtime due to viruses or other rubbish. Whether this is due to market share or not, I don't care - my desktop Linux box hasn't had downtime other than for hardware changes for years.

I like that I can pick up my personal config from a Linux box and migrate it to new hardware just by copying /home. I don't have to rebuild configs that were stored in registry keys on Window boxes and thus lost during a migration.

Re:Pay for Linux...

[marsu_k]

If you read the article at all, the "Official" release of Mandrake will still be available as a free download. However, you can buy a boxed set or "join the club" to support Mandrake.

I'm personally running 9.2 on this computer right now, and despite of hearing many complaints about bugs I can't say they've bothered me too much. Yes, I've had to install a few patches and bugfixes (and the kernel source wasn't included in the downloadable ISO's, which is kinda strange), but as I have a DSL connection this hasn't been an issue. Urpmi is great, the PLF rpm's too.

I haven't paid anything yet - but am concidering buying 10.0 Official boxed. Just to support them.

Re:Pay for Linux...

[ishark]

I'm paying for linux Mandrake. I don't buy any boxed set, but I donated some money before the club existed, then I subscribed at the "entry" level, now I'm a silver member. I don't really use any of the advantages of being a club member, except the club repository for commercial apps, which allows me to install (and uninstall) non-free stuff quickly.

I see my subscription as hiring a group of talented programmers to build a product which I like and I want to keep using. I'm also anti-MS, or, more precisely, anti-MS-users, for the very simple reason that they assume the non-sequitur that since I know linux I must be good and be able to solve all their windows problems......

Linux I use for: (1) the compatibility with workstations (even if today they are being replaced by PCs). Basically I can code at home and my software will run anywhere I have a c compiler and X11 (I don't do any low-level system programming, so cross-unix compatibility is not a problem). (2) I get for free a lot of developement tools which on MS would cost a lot of money. I'm not a professional programmer, and I'm not ready to spend that amount of money just to code for fun. (3) I don't like the "closed" approach of windows and the systematic incompatibility that goes with it. I like to be able to mess with the files generated by system/software.

I still have a win partition to play games, and this is also one reason I won't switch to OS-X: too few games for the Apple hardware. (I'm also familiar with linux and unless I get some big advantage I won't to switch).

Big picture:

[capn_buzzcut]

Mandrake is responding to its user's wishes. If you don't like the way Mandrake does things, the good news is that there are several other distros to choose from. There's no need to rag on Mandrake for making this change - it's certainly more innovative and user friendly than what Redhat and Suse have done with their sales model. Remember, you can still download free Mandrake iso's and updates are still free too.

Todo List..

[BeemanH2O]

TODO:

1) Confuse customer with new alpha/beta/RC/final system
2) ???
3) Profit!

Bzzzz Wrong

[bogie]

"2) Fedora is in fact the same as the Mandrake Cooker project, which started... 5 years ago."

Nope sorry Fedora is NOT the same as Cooker. Ever heard of Rawhide? Who is copying who again?

Second off Fedora releases go through a LOT of public testing unlike Rawhide and Mandrake Cooker. Fedora IS designed to be a stable release. Cooker, "Cooker is an experimental distribution, it's not for daily use!". Contrast that with "The goal of the Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software.". Pretty dam big difference.

The ONLY difference between Fedora and Mandrake's new "community" product is the respective QA of each company and how long the releases are supported.

Good Troll, but *Red Hat* is the one innovating here.

Re:Bzzzz Wrong

[KeyserDK]

Well following rawhide was pretty impossible with only a package manager, and no dependency resolver.

Re:Bzzzz Wrong

[steve_l]

That's the Fedora Core-1 that doesn't bring up networking on a laptop with the net adapter on a PC card? I had to track down that problem on the redhat mail list archive -it turns out that its related to the fancy new boot time GUI? After that experience I concluded that broad QA is something lacking in the core-1 program.

I don't know if mandrakes' is any better, and I don't know if their business model is going to prove any better in the long term either. But I can say I do not like Core-1 and can not afford to move to the $300/box/year fee for a commercial release. At least mandrake's production systems are priced sensibly for end users.

Red Hat has to make Fedora viable, as otherwise the people who used RedHat without paying for it (most of us :) will migrate to other things. Its what I'm doing, and as mandrake 9.2 works with VMware, it is what I am rolling out across the board.

As an aside, I think both distributors have a challenge surviving. RedHat's new policy 'compete with Windows by charging more' doesn't seem any more viable than 'give it away'. Both vendor's community projects are clearly attempts to get the debian advantage -community involvement- while still being able to charge for the release versions. Too bad debian got there first.

Re:Bzzzz Wrong

[mp3phish]

"Good Troll, but *Red Hat* is the one innovating here."

Ever heard of the debian project? It has lots of commercial spinoffs, with a comunity maintained base system. In fact, it is the foundation of: UserLinux, Xandros, Progeny Linux, Knoppix, and Lindows OS.

In fact, Fedora, and Mandrake's new distribution, are both based around the social community model which already exists in Debian. RedHat just took this model and applied it to their proprietary distribution. There's nothing new to see here.

Re:Bzzzz Wrong

[CMonk]

Rawhide no longer exists with that name, see the README in that directory.

Thanks for your interest in Rawhide. The Rawhide development tree is now associated with the Fedora Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/ Rawhide is now available from: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux /core/development/ ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/ core/development/ and from various mirror sites; see: http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html

Fedora includes Yum which does dependency resolution. I can't remember but I seem to remember it including apt-rpm as well. In any case up2date supports multiple depedency checking backends now so tracking the development branch should be much easier.

Re:Bzzzz Wrong

[buchanmilne]

Nope sorry Fedora is NOT the same as Cooker. Ever heard of Rawhide? Who is copying who again?

OK, so show me the list of packages in Rawhide that have been maintained by the community.

Show me the collaborative website that tracked the development of Rawhide.

Show me the public CVS for packaging.

Show me the public CVS (with community members who have commit rights) in the software specific to the distro.

All of this has been in place for Mandrake cooker for more than a year, many have been in place for more than 3 years.

Sorry, Rawhide wasn't anywhere near as community oriented as Cooker was, and Fedora still has a long way to go before they are as open.

The only distro that may be as close to being open to the common user is Debian ... but not quite ...

And yes, I maintain a number of packages in Mandrake main, and lots in contrib ...

Second off Fedora releases go through a LOT of public testing unlike Rawhide and Mandrake Cooker.

There are hundreds of users who run Cooker as a desktop distro, and some even run it on (non-production) servers, plus there is an official 2-month testing cycle. But, you could find all of that out on the (aforementioned) wiki. The only issue is it's still not wide enough testing to catch bugs in software no-one else is shipping by default (or where the distro doesn't have enough resources to debug it, like Gentoo), such as the packet-writing patch, which is now safe for the rest of us *because* Mandrake shipped it in a disto many users used.

Contrast that with "The goal of the Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software.". Pretty dam big difference.

If you're comparing Cooker to Fedora releases, what do you compare the Mandrake Community release to? RHEL? At least Mandrake Community is better packaged ... and then there will still be Mandrake Official, and the Corporate Server products for those who need longer support.

Sorry, but you're not comparing apples with apples here ...

The ONLY difference between Fedora and Mandrake's new "community" product is the respective QA of each company and how long the releases are supported.

Yes, with Fedora you get 9 months, with Mandrake Community you get 3 months + whatever the official release gets (at least another 18 months for most releases).

Good Troll, but *Red Hat* is the one innovating here.

Right ...

Re:Bzzzz Wrong

[lordsoftheio's]

Well since support and QA are the only difference i guess since mandrake offers support for 18 months of all releases and fedora only offers it for the current release Mandrake still comes out ahead. Thanks for pointing that out, cluebie.

Note:

[geekoid]

I did not say anything about money.
I asked what they get.

It doesn't have to be cash. I feel this is an important point, because the drive that makes Linux great, may not be the same as today contributors get older, and the young tech see linux as something thats been 'done'.

Re:Note:

[Anonymous Coward]

I get an operating system.

Re:Note:

[Afrosheen]

What they ultimately GET is self-evident. If you're downloading betas and release candidates and providing feedback (via mailing lists, bugtraq, whatever), what you end up getting is a more stable distro with features yourself and others have requested. Input is valuable in projects of this scale *particularly* with the unbelievable variety of x86 hardware. What works for you may not work for someone else with identical hardware, differing only by something as miniscule as a single piece of usb hardware.

Re:Note:

[DCowern]

Actually, Mandrake is one the only (or maybe the only?) open source company that offers benefits to their developers and testers outside of a free product. About a year and a half ago when the company was in severe financial trouble and needed to raise cash, they started a special program where developers and testers could buy stock in the company at a discounted rate.

If you ever get involved with the cooker community and interface with the developers and corporate types at Mandrake, you'll understand that they really apprieciate the help of the community and really understand the vital role we play in getting their product to market.

I have to say the attitude they possess is the reason I've stuck with Mandrake as my distro of choice through thick times and thin (i.e. the initial release of 9.2).

For those french speakers out there...

[anarcat]

[Funny how /. strips out all non-pure-ascii characters from posts... Can't use dead keys here?]

Remember, Mandrake is french, so you have the bonus of having the french press release too!

Pour ceux qui parlent francais dans la foule: n'oubliez pas! Mandrake est une entreprise francaise, alors vous avez enfin la chance de lire un communique en francais!

Le communique!

Re:For those french speakers out there...

[Thomas Miconi]

The French press release is obviously a translation of the original Humricun English. And not a very good one at that.

Mais a partir de maintenant, une seconde version "solide comme du roc"...

Hell, if I had put a translation like this in an assignement my English teacher would have skinned me alive !

Think of a L'Oreal effect here. What do you think came first, "Because I'm worth it" or "Parce que je le vaux bien" ?

Only difference is, you don't get the sexy Laetitia Casta shots as a bonus - yet :-)

Thomas Miconi

I agree..

[msimm]

We'll end up with a Mandrake stable, which we've never had (and probably keeps them off some corporate desktops) and I'd imagine the testing Mandrake will be pretty much the same as regular Mandrake has always been (bleeding edge, sometimes buggy and still the best of both worlds).

For those posters complaining about the new 'Official' release being out of date, bleeding edge will *still* be in the community version, nothings changed. I'd guess the 'official' version will focus more on thier new Corporate desktop push and configuration/usability technologies. Makes perfect sense to me and maybe we can see some more serious usability enhancements (DrakConf is great, but not much has changed lately) now that some of their costs will be more focused (if the community comes together, which seems pretty active already in the club).

Re:Mandrake Needed, *BSD Dead and Mummified

[Apostata]

The only thing on-topic about your post is the word "Mandrake" in the subject header.

Re:Pay for Linux... MandrakeClub

[Anonymous Coward]

To answer your *first* question: I'd been using Red Hat on desktops & servers for years (ever since Caldera Network Desktop, built atop Red Hat Linux 3.x), and had paid for Linux distros a few times. When RHAT EOL'ed 8x/9.0, I had to find something else. RHAT's commitmemnt for supporting Fedora is unproven. Debian folks still can't figure out how to use digital signatures for their packages. SuSE won't let me download ISOs to try. But Mandrake gave me everything for free and asked me to join MandrakeClub if I wanted to, and gave me choices about how much to give. So I gave.

Re:How to be European

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot the part about avoiding bathing at all cost.

Isn't that what beta testers are for?

[cybercfo]

Gee, don't take advantage of the beta testers and actually make them test the release or nuthin'

How funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody marked this as a troll. Yet, in most companies QA is a cost center. In MS's world, it is a profit center. That represents the ultimate in capitalism. Perhaps only Linux with its' programming model is more capitalistic.

The comment was meant in admiration, not as a troll.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

By the same token, if Mandrake will be 10.0, will Gentoo 2004 be 200.4 times better?

Change that name: MandrakeClub

[dark-br]

I said it before, and I say it again:

No way I'm going to enter bills for Mandrake Club Services from a French company into my books.

I do not want to explain to the accountant and the taxman that Mandrake Club is not a parisian brothel.

For gods sake, choose a professional, if boring, name.

So where's the update 9.2 ISO images?

[Anonymous Coward]

If mandrake are so committed to the community, why don't they release the 9.2 ISO's that won't destroy your cdrom drives, instead of hiding them for club members only?

Pro-RedHat...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is pro-american!

Re:OT,but someone has to make the [NO CARRIER] jok

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows software modems are fucking junk. You're probably the asshole that designed it.

Gentoo

[destiney]

If you guys would just shutup and install Gentoo you wouldn't be having these stupid distro discussions.

Gentoo is simple, one install per machine for life.

Put this in your daily cron to keep the whole system up to date:
emerge sync
emerge -pvu world
Then every morning you can see what new stuff you may want to update that day.

Look for new software with:
emerge -s whatever

Remove software with:
emerge -pvC whatever

Unless you have and run exactly what chipset and compiler flags your "distro" based binarys are compiled for, your system will never be as fast as it can be.

And thanks RedHat for making me a Gentoo user!

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

note: i use a gentoo system half the time. i think it's a wonderful distro. but to suggest that everyone should be running gentoo either makes you arrogent, elitiest, ignorant, or just plain stupid. sure, gentoo will make your system be as fast a it can be. but it'll take you a upwards week just to compile everything (that is IF you don't run into installation trouble, which new users ALWAYS do). need kde? sure, it'll take 8 hours on a top of the line pc. need mozilla firebird? sure, a few hours there to compile. oh oh, or how about openoffice. 10 to 20 hours (or more if estimates are correct) to compile.

gentoo is a great distro. that's why i use it. but it's not for everyone. mandrake in my opinion is equally great. i have a lot of respect for them and what they do, though i may not use their flavor of linux. they have some pretty cool stuff come out of their little shop there.

Re:Gentoo

[destiney]

but to suggest that everyone should be running gentoo either makes you arrogent, elitiest, ignorant, or just plain stupid.

Since you put it that way, I guess I'll take the first two.

sure, gentoo will make your system be as fast a it can be. but it'll take you a upwards week just to compile everything

P133/64M 38hours.
P233/128M 23hours
Maybe you're not holding your mouth right when you type 'emerge system'.

(that is IF you don't run into installation trouble, which new users ALWAYS do).

I never had a question I couldn't find the answer to on Google, forums.gentoo.org, or the Gentoo listserv. How many distros even have a company sponsored community list serv?

need kde? sure, it'll take 8 hours on a top of the line pc.

My Athlon 1.67Ghz compiled the base system + X + KDE in less than a day. Stop your whining and turn off the quake server until the compile is done.

need mozilla firebird? sure, a few hours there to compile. oh oh, or how about openoffice. 10 to 20 hours (or more if estimates are correct) to compile.

If you don't think you have compile time, then compare the pains of upgrading to a whole new distro, add .iso download time, burn time, and install time, and Gentoo easily wins at my place.

gentoo is a great distro. that's why i use it. but it's not for everyone.

Sure it is, with people like you all whining about a little compile time, less new people will try it. So shut it.

Re:Gentoo

[krmt]

How many distros even have a company sponsored community list serv?

Debian does. Has for a long time. It has a lot of company sponsored servers for just about everything, as well as mirrors. Plus there are university sponsored ones, and a few private machines out there as well for development tasks.

Sure it is, with people like you all whining about a little compile time, less new people will try it. So shut it.

Wow, that makes me trust your opinion. The compile time really is an issue with gentoo. If you don't mind it, then it's fine, but if you do then you should be aware of it. There's no One True Distro, thankfully, nor will there ever be.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe i compile more packages into my system then you, but on my athlon xp 3000+ it def takes more than "a day" to install.

If you don't think you have compile time, then compare the pains of upgrading to a whole new distro, add .iso download time, burn time, and install time, and Gentoo easily wins at my place.

thank you for proving my point. even if you were correct with your estimates on compile time (which i believe are way too optimistic unless you're running a bare bones system), your "less than a day" is still longer than the 30-60 minutes it takes to install/upgrade mandrake with all the trimmings.

and i haven't even talked about configuration yet. i don't know about you (who apparently knows everything and can install gentoo with your eyes closed), but i had to repeately configure and recompile the kernel until i had the options just right. 3c2000 NIC card? not built in. gotta go look for it. and alsa is just nuts. via8223 sound card took me quite a while to get working. and even then, the sound quality was very, very scratchy (took me a day to figure out how to fix that too). radeon 9800 card? oh yeah, that was a bit fun. i still can't get the resolution i wanted and have to settle with a lower resolution. etc, etc, etc, etc.

but i think even with all my troubles gentoo is still worth it because i have THE TIME to work with it. many people do not. get that through your head. lots of people can't afford to/would rather not have their computer tied up for "less than a day" compiling packages when they could easily grab mandrake and be up and running long before a gentoo install got through stage 2.

everyone is not like you, so give your ego a rest. recognize that different people have different needs. and, thus, more than one distro is good for all linux users.

Re:Gentoo

[destiney]

your "less than a day" is still longer than the 30-60 minutes it takes to install/upgrade mandrake with all the trimmings.

Yeah, multiply that by how many times you will reinstall Mandrake over the next 5-7 years because of the distro's end of life and new releases. Then add all your rpm dependancy troubleshooting time you will go through for each install. Then add your time of turning un-needed services off, securing the system, etc. If you think all that is less effort than a one-time Gentoo install you're nuts.

but i had to repeately configure and recompile the kernel until i had the options just right.

That's true of any distro until you get to know your hardware. I suspect if you want a bloated kernel with everything compiled in then you're golden using Mandrake. I'd rather have a smaller, faster kernel myself so I always compile my own. Then I backup my .config files so I never have to do them again for a given machine. make oldconfig works great on old kernel .config files.

alsa is just nuts

I suppose some people are incapable of following simple instructions. I've never once had an issue getting alsa working with Gentoo.

everyone is not like you, so give your ego a rest. recognize that different people have different needs. and, thus, more than one distro is good for all linux users.

It's not about ego, it's about doing the job right. Running binarys that are not optimized for the hardware they run on is just lazy on the part of the system administrator.

Compiler flags exist, use them!

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

multiply [the 30-60 minutes it takes to install/update mandrake with all the trimmings] by how many times you will reinstall Mandrake over the next 5-7 years because of the distro's end of life and new releases. ... If you think all that is less effort than a one-time Gentoo install you're nuts.

uhhh, 30 minutes times 6 is still only 3 hours. were you trying to make a point? and mandrake does have a "cooker" which is similar to gentoo's ~x86 in case you didn't know.

I suspect if you want a bloated kernel with everything compiled in then you're golden using Mandrake

don't you mean if a person wanted a linux distro with excellent hardware detection, they're golden with mandrake? it's funny how you turned one of mandrake's positives into a negative. mandrake is designed to get linux up and running quickly.

I'd rather have a smaller, faster kernel myself so I always compile my own

exactly! that is why you're using gentoo. but for people who don't care to have a "smaller, faster kernel" and just want linux up and running, gentoo is not for them.

I suppose some people are incapable of following simple instructions [for setting up alsa]

wrong. search the gentoo forums to via8223, via8235, etc, etc, etc.

I've never once had an issue getting alsa working with Gentoo.

good for you! what does that have to do with my hardware?

Running binarys that are not optimized for the hardware they run on is just lazy on the part of the system administrator.

i don't know too many system administrators running gentoo across the board. to be honest, this is the first i've heard of it. if that's true, then more power to you. but the point still stands, not everyone has the time or willingness to compile everything. i mean, am i missing something? can you really not see the situation for what it truely is? different linux users have different needs. hence, there are different distros to satisify those diverting needs.

to be honest, i'm really glad it wasn't someone like you who introduced me to gentoo. because if it was you telling me how nice and easy is to install gentoo and get it running after only one day, i would have quit the morning after. luckly, it was someone who warned me that it would take patience and that though the installation would usually be completed after devoting an entire weekend, that i should be prepared to spend much more time if troubles arise. and, boy, did troubles arise. but i'm glad i stuck with it.

if your goal to convert people to gentoo, you're doing a crappy job. i'd suggest you tell it as it is. inform them of the positives along with the negatives. don't suger coat anything. installing gentoo takes time, patience, and a willingness to learn. by not warning them ahead of time, you're doing potential gentoo users a great injustice. i waited for over a year before i went ahead in installing gentoo because i knew it would take a lot of time, and i wouldn't be able to spend any extra time if i ran into issues. and now after the process was finally over, i was glad i waited.

allow linux users to make an informed decision based on all the positives and negatives. if they go with gentoo, great! if they don't or decide to wait a while, it's should be understandable. respect their decision. again, RESPECT their decision. sheesh, am i getting through to you yet? please don't make gentoo users look bad

Re:Gentoo

[paroneayea]

You do have a point, sort of... though it's a bit skewed by your overwhelming rage. Still, I'm a Gentoo user myself, formerly a Manrake user.. and I've got to say that Gentoo is definetly the best distro around. However, it's no easy install.
Now for someone like myself who enjoys spending numerous hours tinkering with settings and getting to know my OS... it's great, and I'm not complaining. After you install Gentoo the first time, it's pretty easy thereon out (it's really just the initial startup that's a bitch).
Now could my mother install Gentoo? Hell no! But could she install Mandrake? Psh. Piece of cake.
Still, dependencies are kind of a pain in the ass with mandrake, and I agree... setting your own config options and not having to deal with the distro's binary ones is such a lifesaver. So here's what I'm thinking. Mandrake should use their skill in the area of making newbie-friendly installs, and borrow the portage system. No, I really am serious.

Re:Gentoo

[destiney]

good for you! what does that have to do with my hardware?

It means your incapable of following simple instructions for your particular chipset.

i mean, am i missing something?

Obviously.. If you wanna run bloated binaries on your own hardware that you don't even seem to know very well, that's your own laziness. But you can always count on smart people telling you that's not optimal, and that a better way exists. A little extra time invested in the beginning goes a hell of a long way in performance gains down the road.

i waited for over a year before i went ahead in installing gentoo

The docs are right there.. so aside from someone doing the install for you, I don't see taking a year to prepare for a simple install. I think you needed the year to get up off your lazy ass and do it.

allow linux users to make an informed decision based on all the positives and negatives.

What negatives? I see none. All I see is a lazy wanna-be linux user who thinks average is good enough. Maybe you should try politics Anonymous Coward.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

It means your incapable of following simple instructions for your particular chipset.

haha, you're pretty funny. you obviously don't read. please search the gentoo forums before making blanketed statements on reading "simple instructions." and if i wasn't clear the first time, those instructions do not apply to my situation.

and please do not call linux users "lazy." you're only making yourself look stupid (i have no problem with that though). i'm sorry if you don't have a life and have all the time in the world to compile anything you want anytime you want. but most people in the world have busy schedules they need to work around. you're not unemployed by chance are you?

and negatives? compiling programs require a lot of time on the part of the user. heeeellllloooo? anybody home? i sincerely hope you are more intelligent than you sound.

these arguments are fun. keep them coming.

Re:Gentoo

[destiney]

those instructions do not apply to my situation.

Hey clueless, your chipset is listed right there on the goddamn alsa page. A trained monkey could install the thing with those instructions. Your only situation is that you need to pull your thumb out of your ass and get a clue.

and please do not call linux users "lazy."

I'm not calling linux users lazy, I'm calling you lazy fucktard.

you're not unemployed by chance are you?

Like it's any of your fucking business.. but yeah, I got a pretty sweet job. I'm a work-from-home IT Manager. I manage a small team of programmers and sysadmins. I work from home every day except Tuesdays. I go into the office once a week for a couple of short meetings. Then it's back home for another work week where I do what I do best: programming, running Linux servers, and calling out lazy idiots like you when I see them. Everyday I get up around 8:55, walk down stairs to my office, login to my workstation and start my day. I can feel your envy from here!

i sincerely hope you are more intelligent than you sound.

There's no need in hoping anything on my behalf, my systems all have sound and work great.

compiling programs require a lot of time on the part of the user.

Oh boo! Poor baby can't stand a little compile time. You might as well just use windows as lazy as you are.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey man, This thread is for Mandrake.
Would you Gentoo and Debian zealots PLEASE, PLEASE allow us to exchange info on OUR favorite distro without you doing shameless plugs. 80% of Mandrake, Red Hat or SuSe threads are plugs for other distros.

Re:Gentoo

[buchanmilne]

Gentoo is simple, one install per machine for life.

On Mandrake also, except it doesn't take a week to get a functional system.


Put this in your daily cron to keep the whole system up to date:
emerge sync


urpmi.update


emerge -pvu world


urpmi --auto-select --auto


Then every morning you can see what new stuff you may want to update that day.


On Mandrake it's already updated for you, you don't have to wait the rest of the day for it to compile ...


Look for new software with:
emerge -s whatever


urpmq -y whatever
(not quite the same, but there are other tools)


Remove software with:
emerge -pvC whatever


urpme whatever

Unless you have and run exactly what chipset and compiler flags your "distro" based binarys are compiled for, your system will never be as fast as it can be.

Mandrake already ships with the optimisations that make the biggest difference ... some optimisations for your "chipset" (I assume you mean CPU, there aren't many compile-time optimisations you can make for the motherboard chipset besides in the kernel ...) cause instability (OpenOffice.org for instance doens't do -O3), and most software doesn't have support for MMX etc (only multimedia stuff), and in those cases there are conditionals in the packages, so it's a simple 'rpm --rebuild --with mmx mplayer*.src.rpm'.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello Mr. Big IT Manager. I bet you are a real tough guy. However, something tells me you walk around in diapers 'for the stimulating effect'.

Re:Gentoo

[destiney]

I bet you are a real tough guy.

That's a pretty wise bet.

Re:Gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

awww, did i hit a nerve? getting a bit upset aren't we? and the "goddamn alsa page" didn't work for me. so as i had said before if you had actually read before speaking was that i had to go off and do something different to get sound working. so, um, how hard was that to understand? for all your nonsense about trained monkeys, it sure feels like i'm speaking to a monkey and nothing more.

and with your excellent listening, critiquing, and people skills, i'm sure you're one heck of manager. you go into the office only one day a week? gee, i wonder why? this is great, man. i went from thinking you were just ignorant and elitist (the elitists are usually ignorant anyway) to seeing that you're anti-social as well. any other negative characteristics you'd like to put on display?

these arguments are fun. keep them coming.

Version Numbers

[markdavis]

I suggest that when the first Mandrake 10 release appears, it should be called "10.0". The "official" release, afterwards, should be called "10.0.1"

The next would be "10.1" and "10.1.1"; then "10.2" and "10.2.1".

This would fall in-line with the way 9.2 and 9.2.1 were released. Otherwise, I fear there will be **great** confusion!!! The release number should
directly indicate which exact version is in an ISO image, or on a computer, etc.

I strongly support the idea of interim ISO releases, after all the bugs and security updates are shaken out.... the 9.2.1 release was an extremely good idea.

I forwared this comment to Mandrake, hopefully they are listening :)

MOD PARENT UP +5 INFORMATIVE

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Wait a minute?

[Herschel Cohen]

It would be nice if you gathered a bit of knowledge before you exhibited how ignorant you really are.

To begin: it was the sharp new management that came in and began a buying binge that put Mandrake into a dangerous financial position. This group too was pulling Mandrake from their Linux roots. Only after returning to the original lead and those roots did its financial status and product quality improve. Moreover, Mandrake moved from loses into a profit this past quarter.

Since you are using the SCO model to critique: it was SCO that was closed source that bought the more or less open source company and has been hell on wheels since then.

Get a few facts straight before blowing off on your preconcieved ideas. It would make reading the comments here from all sides easier to take.

But debian-unstable scares me on bugreps

[steve_l]

Even the Java projects I work on at apache are scared of debian unstable.

The last recent one -java code (in Ant) that was doing a touch wasnt working. The cause? the c library code to set the filetime was broken. Fundamental things like that going wrong worry me.

Still, it is easier to replicate a debian-unstable build than a redhat enterprise system -if someone files a bugrep on the latter, I cannot just bring it up in a VMware window for a closer look.

The litmus test for any 'Desktop' solution:

[Killswitch1968]

Can grandma use it? Are programs and drivers simple to install? If not, it's back to the drawing board fellas.

One of the major problems with any Linux distro is the designers (nerds) make it for themselves. XP isn't dominant because of a monopoly, it's dominant because it's so damn easy for even the most inept of users. People could care less about security holes, instability, support-a-coroporate-monolith, if it means they can actually get their computer to do what they want it to.
You can be a Linux elitist all you want, but don't blame Microsoft for the Open Source's failure to create a product for the MAJORITY of desktop users (read: computer illiterates).

Re:The litmus test for any 'Desktop' solution:

[Anonymous Coward]

So this is why I make money installing software for people on Windows systems??? And cleaning the easy to install adware off of them, and reinstalling drivers for the nth time that windows has forgotten about (or corrupted...)

I do tech support for several businesses and individuals. With the windows systems I'm usually installing software/reinstalling drivers/software because the registry or _something_ has become corrupted/ removing viruses/adware. Or trying to explain the difference between having office 2000 and windows 2000.... (oh help...)...

On the few linux systems I help with, the system either sits quietly in the corner doing it's job ((as a server) with the users interacting directly at most 3 times a week), or as a desktop where I find I'm not fixing problems, I'm helping figure out "how you do something like wordart in OpenOffice." The usability issues I've seen aren't that it's "too hard", but that it's different. i.e. It's not called "WordArt", it goes under another name. (Draw Functions... Text Animation.... enter your text, then Format.... FontWork to do "wordarty" effects. For one way to skin that feline....)

Most of the people I support don't install software everyday. In fact, the thought scares some of them. The ones that do install software everyday are more than likely the ones I'm having to clean trojans off their systems..... So you might say in some respects it's too easy to install software in windows. That you should NEED the administrator password and go through an integrated Software Installer.

Of course, I never thought that any of the following were too hard....

Click K gear.... click configuration... packaging... Install Software... type root password... search for software and then click install...

konsole window, type su (enter password) urpmi mysoftware
or konsole window, type su (enter password) apt-get install mysoftware

Or download software, then type urpmi mydownload.rpm... or double click the download and type the root password to open it in the software installer...

It seems I've pulled my hair out with more Windows software installs than linux. Of course, people have a tendency to deploy software across a multitude of windows versions in small businesses which leads to quite a few problems.

Re:The litmus test for any 'Desktop' solution:

[Killswitch1968]

This is classic causation error. People that use Linux computers dont need tech support as much as people with Windows computers, therefore Windows is bad.

It's flawed logic because people with Linux computers are BY DEFAULT computer savvy. Think about what I said: If you gave Grandma Mandrake would she be more or less frustrated than with a computer that had Norton+Spybot+XP?

Re:The litmus test for any 'Desktop' solution:

[kilgortrout]

I'd like to see your gradma install winxp+norton+spybot. Once you get any OS set up it will work good for a while. The trouble with windows is that it breaks all too soon, either due to its inherent instablility or its insanely flawed approach to security, while linux just keeps juggin along.

Re:The litmus test for any 'Desktop' solution:

[Killswitch1968]

Assuming XP was already installed, I'm sure most people would have little trouble with Norton or Spybot. However using the command line? People tend to freak out when there's no 'Next' button.

Chuggin' along is all well and good, but an efficient OS is no good if you can't use it. As I said, security and stability will always play 2nd fiddle to basic, practical, SIMPLE usage.

Red Hat is the one innovating?

[TrentC]

Good Troll, but *Red Hat* is the one innovating here.

I'll be sure to tell the Debian project that the way they've been doing things for the past 10 years is now an "innovation" from Red Hat.

Jay (=

Hrm...

[GarfBond]

This sounds like a refinement of RH's strategy to me. Fedora's designed for consumer usage, with certain features from Fedora eventually finding their way to RHEL (say, if someone working on Fedora comes up with an amazingly good idea, or some such).

Of course, the only difference seems to be that Mandrake's "official" releases are still targeted at the consumer with download editions, while the "official" fedora releases are meant for corporate consumption.

NEW IMPROVED: Red Hat to Mandrake upgrade tool!

[Thoron]

echo 'Red Hat' | sed 's/Red Hat/Mandrake/g'

Re:So...

[t0ny]

Meaning, the 'community' gets to beta test, so that they can eventually release their 'official' version.

Sounds like they are copying what everybody else does.

Debian

[tacocat]

Sounds like the same release process that Debian has had all along.

Also sounds a lot like the RedHat - Fedora release process recently announced.

Hmmm... It must work.

I wonder what SuSE will do?

For Gentooists...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cooker == ~arch
Unstable == arch
Stable == portage-ng should support "stability" by early 2006!

First with partitioning utility?

[salimma]

Err... I presume the PR meant first with *graphical* partitioning utility, since even the bare-bones fdisk counts as one.

In fact, I still use fdisk in conjunction with Anaconda's GUI to GNU parted; when one is fussy about the positioning and naming of partitions on disk, one have to.

To their credit, Mandrake has one of the more powerful GUI partitioning utility around. Apart from that one release (9.0 IIRC?) where you could not enter the partition size manually and have to use sliders!

drat

[CAIMLAS]

And here I was, hoping that "Switch from use of RPM to DEB package management" and "Get rid of /etc/sysconfig and do things in a less redundant manner" were on their list.

Maybe they're saving that for a later release? Doubt it, personally. You'd think they'd make the change, though - package management is much easier with debian than with an RPM system.

I paid this time around.

[PotatoHead]

Gave 'em about 120 bucks. Bought a year of the Club, then bought a boxed 9.2 set with the discount Club membership gives you. That throws an extra month into the Membership as well.

The way I see it, they deserve some support for services well rendered. I downloaded 8.2 and am still using it. (Very good release overall.)

9.2 was a bit of a wash for me. Lots of new stuff, but some rather annoying bugs. The 9.2.1 iso looks to be well worth the club membership. (When I get to downloading it that is..)

Back before I tried 8.2, I tried many distros. All of them were cool, but 8.2 really stuck with me. Their overall direction is the most Desktop like for me. (I detect a slight IRIXish feel to the tools and terminology I like.

Nice to see them in the positive.

Re:How to be European

[Lord Kano]

Don't forget

6. Call on those Americans, that you complain about, to save you when a genocidal madman is taking over the entire continent.

Redhat

[Anonymous Coward]

Well now that redhat isn't made anymore they have no-one else to steal everything from :}

Re:OT,but someone has to make the [NO CARRIER] jok

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows software modems allow many users to get connected to the internet. They are not junk, they work as intended, no more and no less.

Fuck off and die (or just buy a hardware modem, your choice).

Already been in use internally ....

[buchanmilne]

This isn't so much a change in the way Mandrake operates, only in the way they publish the releases.

Mandrake already maintains internal trees of some of the releases. For instance, HP has a version of Mandrake 9.1, 9.1.2, which has all the fixes for 9.1 plus some customisations for HP.

So, now we're just seeing this externally ....

You may also be old enough to remember Mandrake 7.0.1 ...

Chapter?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's with the "chapter" thing? Why "chapter"? What does it mean?

Inevitable

[garbagedisposal]

After the debacle 9.2, it was the last straw for many folks.

They HAD to do something about their appalling QA or lack thereof.

Hope they survive & prosper, some great work in there.

Re:How to be European

[Anonymous Coward]

AHA... do you mean?:
A - those americans that murdered 100.000s when dropping the first atomic bomb ON A CIVIL TARGET

B - those americans that started the Korean war

C - those americans that started Vietnam

D - (enough history) those americans that invaded Iraq because they had evidence of WMD

E - all of the above

Are you another clueless Debian user ...

[buchanmilne]

... comparing apt to rpm?

package management is much easier with debian than with an RPM system.

So I'm guessing you use dpkg to install all packages on your Debian box? What, you don't???

Just as I don't use rpm to install all RPM packages on my box, I use urpmi for 99.9% of them, I only use rpm when I want to revert a package to test scripts in an upgrade scenario for the packages I maintain.

Re:Are you another clueless Debian user ...

[CAIMLAS]

Um, yes, I use dpkg to install all packages on my system, just as you use rpm to install all packages on your system.

The thing that makes dpkg/deb 'easier' than rpms is that rpms have this horrible addiction to breaking and having horrible dependencies. Then it gets to be difficult/a pain in the ass.

Re:Are you another clueless Debian user ...

[buchanmilne]

The thing that makes dpkg/deb 'easier' than rpms is that rpms have this horrible addiction to breaking and having horrible dependencies. Then it gets to be difficult/a pain in the ass.

And what precisely is different about deb's that prevent this? How does a deb package on it's own avoid problems RPMs have??

It doesn't.

There are a few things you can't do with RPMS that you can do with deb's (like suggested packages), and there are a few things you can't do with DEBs that you can with RPMS (AFAIK you can't do triggers with DEBs).

The differences you see between "DEBs" and "RPMs" may largely be due to the fact that you are comparing Redhat RPMs to DEBs. Redhat doesn't do library packages (like Mandrake and Debian do), so upgrading a library package can break all other software that uses that library (whereas on Mandrake you can have say libsasl.so.7 - in libsasl7 - and libsasl2.so.2 - in libsasl2 - installed simultaneously).

So, please don't make generic comparisons.

There is no fundamental difference between DEBs and RPMs regarding library packaging, just differences in the way different distros do it.

There will however always still be some library problems (like the notorious libpng2 vs libpng3 problem), but neither Debain nor Mandrake are better than the other in that respect ... since it's a problem that could even affect source-based distros ....

Re:I'd love to pay , but ...

[AftanGustur]

How many /. type folx are actually paying for linux distributions these days? I'm not seeking flamebait, but just curious. With distro's like Mandrake, Suse, and Redhat all starting to charge some cash for their production releases, are more people starting to look to alternatives such as Gentoo and Debian?

Actually I'd love to pay for Mandrake, the only problem is that the product life is damn to short .. 18 months for something I want to install onto production servers is wayyyy to short ..

Even the 3 year Mandrake "Corporate Server" is a bit young death for my liking ..

What I would like is something with a 5-6 year product life that could be bought under support contract.

I have raised this issue both in the mandrakeclub and with our Linux support company who has some connections to Mandrake, but so far, nothing has come out of it ..

I'd realy love to use Mandrake but so far SuSE looks like the best choice for a production server.

Re:How to be European

[Lord Kano]

hose americans that murdered 100.000s when dropping the first atomic bomb ON A CIVIL TARGET

Those "civil" targets were producing equipment for the Japanese war machine.

those americans that started Vietnam

Let's forget about the French and all of the others who were there before us.

those americans that invaded Iraq because they had evidence of WMD

Don't forget the Brits who came along with us.

LK

WRONG!! RTFA

[Strog]

Beta -> Beta
Release Candidate -> Release Candidate
Release Version -> Community
Release + patches and bugfixes -> Official

It doesn't move everything back, it more or less adds a .1 release to create the official. They attempted to have all the patches and fixes downloadable right in the setup but that didn't really seem to help. I think this is a good attempt to shake the bugs out and still keep a recent system.

It's kinda like the BSD model with release being considered mostly reliable but better with post-release patches and fixes. You could draw a lot of other parallels too. The fact is that everything before the release stays the same (betas, RCs, etc.).

Re:Version 10.0 O.T.

[Anonymous Coward]

A Mandrake 6.5 user ehh?

There never was an official 6.5 release from Mandrake. They went from 6.1 to 7.0. It was a cooker snapshot or beta released by Macmillan with the name Mandrake 6.5. Kind of a slimy thing for Macmillan to release a snapshot and claim it's a new version from Mandrake. I suppose they chose 6.5 to not conflict with the real releases.

Maybe you already knew this.