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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."
Around 10.0 Mandrake's networking went down the pan. Cards which worked with 9 suddenly didn't work and lost their settings. At other times the same cards couldn't be detected. Mandrake's Control Centre's display config tool was also terrible. I switched to Fedora and never looked back. One thing Fedora has over Mandrake is the option to install everything. This makes installation a breeze as it's much easier to remove stuff later than plough through Mandrake's maze of sub-menus at install time.
Similar reason means my Lappy's now running Debian - when install time came around, the ability to do everything over wifi (automatically detected I might add) stomped all over the last distro I used (Mandrake 9) with it's 3 CD's of gumpf.
Programming is an Art. I am an Artist. Does that mean I get to wear a daft hat?
I've been waiting for distros to start releasing products yearly. It would be a major improvement if all distros did this. When you're in an office/work environment, it is much easier to remember which what computers need to be upgraded, when the version number is simply a year. It will also be much easier to find packages on the internet, because it's easier for package makers to put everything together when they know that all the libraries, executables, etc. are stable for one year (and they will know more precisely when the next version is going to come out).
Not being a smart ass but serious.
If Mandrake does not work with the Mandrake community, you should fork and create a new community and release your own distro.
It is free software after all.
And that is the way their GUI system config program, drakconf, doesn't seem to interact with CLI tools properly. Something caused my network setup to go down the toilet; When I try to figure things out, drakconf says one thing and ifconfig/route/netstat/etc seem to say another. I say "drakconf, delete eth0", and ifconfig still shows it. In the end, I gave up and just canned all network settings and setup the network from scratch (not a big deal: 1 DSL modem, two 10/100 cards), but I shouldn't have had to. Other than that, I think that the keypad-like (as opposed to side bar) button layout of Drakconf in 10.0 sucked bigtime from the usability perspective - good thing that changed with 10.1.
Main things I like are that Mdk unifies the look and feel of KDE and Gnome. It's GUI tools are friendly enough for everyday tasks but you can still go back to the CLI any time you want the power. Oh yeah - did I mention that Konqueror starts in about 2 seconds, eats ~5MB of memory per instance, and has tabbed browsing?
Ease of use, just until you want to compile practically anything at all.
Someone else said it above - many distro's are going the way of 'limited edition' or 'professional' - to me this seems stupid - these companies are trying to make it appear as though there is a difference actually worth paying for. The linux (based distro) that I am used to has always included enough to compile at least the kernel - getting harder to find anything like that these days.
I'm sure someone will shoot holes in my argument, but the last version of Mandrake I downloaded (10.1) did not allow me to compile enlightenment out of the box (or with minimal effort finding dependencies) - so I dumped it - Fedora and Solaris for me, for now.
--
Simon
I use the distro since its first versions and one of its biggest grief was its development cycle.
To have official releases wich would go to retail with issues which needed only a little more time to be fixed, was quite difficult to stand for an end user oriented distro (I'm not talking of the corporate version here whose development is quite different).
It made support on the forums quite difficult, especially since it gathers a lot of linux beginner, whom you have to explain a lot of things at once to fix small but annoying issues.
The other problem was that the community version wasnt that different (in fact not different at all) from the official version, and lost its meaning quite fast.
Now, as I understand things, in a little while, we will have a more polished and stable release going to retail for those who like the userfriendlyness of the distro but hate its bugs, and more frequent bleeding edge community versions (3 or 4 a year) which will satisfy those wanting to absolutly have the latest KDE or Gnome or those who want to hunt the last irritating bugs that escaped the cookers (the dev community).
Perfect!
Kudos to Mandrakesoft to take the risk to skip one income date in order to improve the quality of the distro.
So now that SuSE has gone all big-American-corporate, the remaining members of the UnitedLinux project are consolidating. How long until MandrakeConnectiva acquires TurboLinux, I wonder? Then they'd have all the emerging markets covered - for whatever that's worth.
For my money, I reckon Red Hat should have bought Ximian, rather than SuSE, thus getting all the GNOME folks under one roof. And then Mandrake, to acquire an easy consumer distro; Mandrake's Red Hat based anyway. SuSE & Connectiva should have merged, bringing their KDE and APT-RPM goodness together instead. That would have made more sense for Novell to acquire. Or Sun...
Liam P. ~ "Intelligence is a lethal mutation." (me)
I don't know if the name will be the new product name, but the registration is true. Both mandriva.com and .net were registered around 1 month ago by some company (registrar names doesn't say much), and mandriva.com.br has been registered by Conectiva just a week ago. Try it out:
http://registro.br/