Slashdot Mirror
Mandrake 2006 Will Integrate Conectiva Components
Linzer writes "Mandrakelinux just issued this press release presenting (1) a new one-year release cycle, with a year-based naming scheme and (2) their updated development roadmap. In a nutshell: the upcoming 10.2 becomes a transitional release, labeled 'Limited Edition 2005.' Next fall will see Mandrakelinux 2006, merging Mdk and Conectiva know-how (and possibly some know-not?)
For the amnesic: Mandrakesoft and Conectiva recently merged." Not everyone is pleased, though: Tingulli 3 writes "As a member of the Italian Mandrakelinux translation team , I spent nights translating some packages to be on schedule for the 10.2 release. I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2 release, without anybody announcing it to the community."
Urpmi makes it a breeze to install everything on Mandrake.
Urpmi is THE main reason why I haven't sought out another distro. I quit using Red Hat in favor of Mandrake because I got sick of rpm-depend-hell. Urpmi solved that forever. I don't particularly like the options that they compiled Apache with, but that's minimal compared to trolling through rpm-depends.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The place where Linux has a real competitive advantage is the less wealthy countries. Compared to the other costs in an organization, the Microsoft tax is a much bigger deal there. What they need is a local source of Linux expertise. They can't pay European wage rates. So, as long as Mandrake doesn't corrupt Conectiva's value chain, they have bought their way into a growth market. Having the distro may just be the cost of entry into the market. As long as they don't try to subsidize the distro with the Brazilian business, they may have found a winning business model.
"I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2 release, without anybody announcing it to the community"
I could be mistaken, but wouldn't that announcement qualify as an announcement to the community?
The only way to evaluate a distro is to install and use it. If you're thinking about mandrake, or Suse, or Fedora, or Debian, or whatever. See if you've got the space to try it out and then do so.
Mandrake is my distro of choice, but I understand that it isn't for everyone.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
As long as they keep pushing out great distros, I wouldn't care if they called it Mandrake v3.14ø (Midnight Flying Frogs) Edition. Been a long time user of it, always been happy with the release and I help hundreds of people switch from windows to Linux using this distro as a good starting point.
In a nutshell: the upcoming 10.2 becomes a transitional release, labeled 'Limited Edition 2005.' ... ["]I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2["]
So the unhappy Mandrake community members are the ones that don't understand the new naming scheme?