Gaël Duval on Mandrake, GNU/Linux in 2005

uninet writes "To catch up on what's new since our last full interview, Mandrakesoft co-founder Gaël Duval recently agreed to talk with me about where the company is heading and other interesting IT current events, such as the Linux Core Consortium and Apple's Mac mini. You can read the new interview on OFB.biz."

Comments

Re:cracking on the mac mini... heh

[SpottedKuh]

Gaël Duval makes the somewhat "interesting" assumption that everyone who buys a desktop computer wants to run Linux on it:

OFB: Is [the Mac Mini] a threat to GNU/Linux on the desktop?
GD: Not really since the Mac Mini is very likely to run Linux.

I think the question OFB was really asking was: Will the inexpensive Mac Mini cause people to choose OS X as a desktop UNIX solution instead of Linux. And while Linux is a fine desktop solution, the simple truth is that if people are willing to spend over $2000 to buy a Powerbook for the sole sake of running OS X, they're probably willing to spend under $500 to have an OS X desktop too.

Re:FP?

[loddington]

Most people dont have the distro news turned on by default. You would suprised how much of slashdot you miss using the standard slashdot filters.

As for Firefox and thunderbird you can get them from mandrakeclub.

Re:What does Mandrake do that RedHat doesn't?

[rmm4pi8]

1) The config tools are better than Redhat's--nice for new users.

2) Equal support for KDE and Gnome.

3) [And this is the real winner] the urpmi tools for automated package management. The repositories are newer than debian-stable without being bleeding edge, and for packages not included (rare given the size of the repositories!) you can use it to stuff in rpm's you've found on your own, and still check and download their dependencies manually. Works pretty well flawlessly, and it's this command line program, not the pretty stuff, keeping me on Mandrake.