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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."
RTFA.... "Later, by fall of this year, the new boxed "2006" release will fully integrate Conectiva technology and Mandrakesoft online services into a new product." Not fall of '06, but fall of '05 will see the "2006" release.
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 have tried many different flavors of Linux. Fedora, Slackware, Debian, Mandrake and my new favorite Suse 9.2. I have to say that my subjective impression of Mandrake is that it is just odd. This doesn't surprise me then that they would make some odd business decisions.
Many of the distros features seemed like they had been thrown in with the basic intent of trying to be like Windows and now this naming scheme seems to remind me of the same thing.
'Limited Edition 2005'= 'Windows ME'Just sounds too similar for my taste!
"We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends. " Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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
Different strokes for different folks, since Mandrake 10.1 I've no problems installing it on hundreds of machines. If anything 10.1 was a step in the right direction. I did try Fedora, but it was a nightmare. Nothing has come close to the ease of use of Mandrake Linux of any distro that I've tried. I can convert people from Windows to Linux because Mandrake has everything they did in windows minus Microsoft office, but that's why Open Office exist ;-)
Mandrake to Acquire Conectiva
For the REALLY amnesic:
Mandrakesoft Acquires Conectiva
What?
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.
I would have to agree with you. I have converted several long time windows users to linux after showing them Mandrake on my laptop. If they can keep up the good work, then I will continue to be a loyal Mandrake user and promoter.
"Carpe diem is what happened to me!"
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).
shots.osdir.com
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?
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.
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 know just what he means; nothing pisses me off like somebody telling me something, and not telling me about it. Bastards.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
>I spent nights translating some packages to be on schedule for the 10.2 release. I was quite disappointed (snip)
Oh, the so-called OSS syndrome (Open Source Slave syndrome)..
Hopefully that'll teach him that it's safer to pick a non-commercial distro (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) to contribute to in the future!
>I could be mistaken, but wouldn't that announcement qualify as an announcement to the community?
I guess he meant the announcement wasn't about the v10.2 per se but rather about the combining of packages in the future (which turned out to include his midnight contributions).
It's funny how the market can support only a handful of commercial distributions. Even RH and Novell/SuSE are having hard time (Novell even has published a RH to SLES9 migration how-to). I believe there should be a similar doc for Win-to-Lin migration, but, WTF? I thought the idea was that Linux distros don't need to compete among themselves because the non-Linux market was actually a big one.
Nothing has come close? You've obviously not tried MEPIS. Having said that though Mandrake 10.0 is still what I use currently dual booted with XP but MEPIS is one of the easiest distro's to install and everything works!
I vote for the Frog name.
I agree that Mandrake is a great newbie distro, but it is also a full fledged Unix for your computer. As people learn they can admin servers running Mandrake, and write Perl scripts on Mandrake.
It is very popular in Europe.
I really wish the Midnight Flying Frogs edition would be released. Corporations are taking the dorkness out of Unix. Blah. Yellowdog doesn't even have fortune any more.
I think I remember Conectiva pioneered APT-rpm. Is Mandrake planning on ditching urpmi? (I thought it was supposed to compare favorably with yum/up2date). Or has Conectiva got tons of experience with udev, and Mandrake would like to replace supermount, or something? Or is this all just to say Mandrake-"2006" will have pretty good brazilean portugese support?
What exactly does Conectiva have to offer?
Didn't take long for that to pop up. Troll Tuesday is tomorrow; try again then. This is Monday. Condoleeza Rice and the French are having a tryst. GW is buds with Chirac. If you want to expose a criminal, dangerous, and subversive OS, I suggest you look no farther than that axis of evil that extends from Redmond, WA to . . . er, Redmond, WA.
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?
Mandrake totally refused to install on my Athlon64 box. I think it was the VIA SATA that did it.
... finally the Linux Desktop surpassed XP !! The trickle will soon turn to a flood ;-)
That was kind of sad, but I don't care, I'm posting this from a Kubuntu LiveCD running on my primary Windows machine. It's completely fantastic, waayyy better than Gnome, super friendly and Konqueror is really nice too.
Little does it know, but Windows is going bye-bye
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Mandrake and they are nice, but I think Mandrake is quite foolish to place so much emphasis on the desktop unless they have a major deal with HP or Gateway and something to guaruntee them retails shelf space.
Very difficult to get EPS (I bought it) onto Mandrake. Cups very difficult to not install. Dependency hell to unistall one dependency of Cups - tied into everything. So - back to rpm and forget dependencies. EPS has some drivers for some printers that their freeware cups does not have.
/usr below two gig.
/or it slows things down, I still use a 350 mhz puter a lot.
Also, on two different computers, and on both distro 10.0 and 10.1 the gui find does not work for me. I put it up as a question twice (I belong to Mandrake club) and no reply except to check locate (yes locate works well for me in a console).
I have people from all over the world in my L'Arche house. Presently people are from Edinburgh, Melbourne, Vancouver via Phillipines, and South Korea). I do attempt to subvert the Windows paradigm, Mandrake comes close, but more attention to detail to standardize against other distro's for software that you pay for and a functioning gui for find is what I need more than KDE 3.3.
Also a couple hundred meg of software updates within a couple of months is a little ridiculous. I have a laptop hard drive on the p-4 U-buddy that is only 10 GB. I need to keep
I hope it doesn't suck as much as it sounds. I would really like to see a 10.11 or else a rock solid 10.2 with the option of staying with the present KDE if the bloat of KDE continues and
Peace
9.1 does that, 9.2 does it well, and they're now up to seven CDs of gumpf in the official version.
OTTOMH, the main Debian repositories for fauxSarge are up over 7GB anyway, which is ~10 CDs worth of gumpf. (-:
Yes, I'm happy that your laptop works well, but your reasoning isn't holding much water.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...one of the updated kernels, 2.6.8.1-12mdk, caused some machines to get all crashy. Updating them to 2.6.8.1-24mdk a few days later made it all shiny and good again, but it was an uncomfortable feeling while it lasted. Other than that, Mnadrake've been pretty good about reliability and pretty quick with working updates.
When Debian has an installer as point-and-click easy as Mandrake's (or better), makes their package management a little more intutive (some of the "not installed" status and stuff is kind of newbie-opaque) and and ships a few other userland-ish tools, I'd happily switch to that.
To put it another way, I can leave some fairly thick people in charge of doing or maintaining a Mandrake installation and the odds are good that nothing tragic will happen. If the day arrives when I can say the same about Debian, I will prefer it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
RTFA.... "Later, by fall of this year, the new boxed "2006" release will fully integrate Conectiva technology and Mandrakesoft online services into a new product." Not fall of '06, but fall of '05 will see the "2006" release.
I wanted to comment on how idiotic the naming scheme is, but you summed it up pretty well.
apt-get has major deficiencies in regards to multilib support (32 and 64 bit versions of an app or library installed at the same time) . Namely, it doesn't support it at all. This is a huge problem if you need to run 32bit apps or libs on your 64bit system. E.g. if you want to run openoffice.org on your amd64 system in 64 bit you'll need to run the 32bit version openoffice since it's not 64bit clean. Same thing if you want to run something like flash or realplayer.
If you look debian on amd64 gets around this by installing a debian ia32 install in a chroot and running 32bit apps in a chroot jail due to the apt limitations.
Given that people probably want to start migrating to amd64 systems and run a 64bit os, the fact that yum supports multilib and apt doesn't is a major bonus for yum.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
--
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.
Later, by fall of this year, the new boxed "2006" release will fully integrate Conectiva technology and Mandrakesoft online services into a new product. It will be released through traditional retail channels as well as by direct sale from Mandrakestore and Mandrakeclub, and will offer all support options and related services.
Note that there is no mention of a download option for Mandrakeclub. Am I missing something?
Right! As a long time MDK-user I now and then think that I must try other distros on another PC to see, if I'm missing out on something. Mostly they work fine, but every time I realize that MDK is what I want. I am no expert and no computer-nerd, but I can find my way around and MDK has long served me privately (2 PC's) and at work 2 servers + LTSP with 25 users and I have never experienced any problem that was not caused by my own fumbling around. MDK 8.2 9.1 10.0 and 10.1 has worked flawlessly out of the box for me on a large number of different PC's with various netcards, but I don't claim that other distros are nessesarily 'bad' just because I didn't make them work properly.. I shall look forward to any new MDK whatever they call it and shall continue to try out other distros...
I was going to say I haven't seen anywhere mentioning this but then I noticed Warly suggesting it on the mailing lists. So long as there are at least two non-commerical yearly releases per year I'd continue to be Mandrakelinux user (I don't want to use a "rolling distro" like Debian unstable/Gentoo so switching to cooker wasn't an option). The worry is how long you get security updates / fixes for. If it's less than 1 year / 2 releases or not at all then the deal doesn't look so good.
I consdier this to be analogous to the Fedora/RHEL model used by Red Hat and rumour has it that SUSE will turn into something similar (with Novell Linux Desktop being the RHEL bit).
I am (?have been until now?) a big Mandrake fan
One of the great things about Mandrake for me has been how up to date it has been generally...
SuSE also prides itself on being up to date. That said though, after the release of the 2005 Ltd Edition (i.e. what would have been Mandrake 10.2,
as currently in beta/rc testing), there will then only be released builds annually? An awful lot
happens in the Linux/GNU community in one year...
This to me seems a big step backwards (yes I know you can keep up to dateish via web downloads - but it's not practical for all users).
Potentially I can see Mandrake becoming very out of date...
After all even Mandrake 10.2/2005 Ltd Ed is already out of date - KDE 3.3, Gnome 2.8..... and it's not even out yet...
Sorry to sound negative, but I'm not convinced this is a good move...
Mike
Linux fan and Win32 developer
Nonsense.
They are only calling a limited edition because it will not be sold through retail. Stop spreading FUD that helps nobody. Sometimes, we, in the Linux commmunity do so much damage to ourselves just so that we can prop "arbitrary preferred distribution".
Mandrake 10.1 is a beautiful distribution. Urpmi and easy urpmi, a web site that allows anyone to set up repositories easily, are wonderful. Which other distribution besides Debian gives you 10,000 packages that install perfectly on a box?
And compiling a kernel is super easy if that's what you want to do. All the software, gcc and friends, is a quick urpmi away.
Moreover, Mandrake is moving to smartpm, which you can read more about at smartpm.org. It installs software from any repository (yum, apt-get, urpmi, red carpet).
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
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 think this is great - this what the community needed - seems like everyone is wanting to jump on the 6 month release cycle bandwagon lately.
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/
Yeah cause apt-get is hard. Does Mandrake come with Java installed and configured? Skype? Realplayer? Nope. Mepis does.
They want to have a stable, fully supported release for corporate, educational, and home use. Like what Redhat has, with their enterprise release schedule. It's nothing new. Redhat just now adopted the 2.6 kernel in their enterprise version, I believe, after hanging on to the stable 2.4 for so long, not to mention relatively old software versions, by most 'bleeding edge' power users' standards. Going for stable over newest.
finally linux distro's are starting to make sense. I like having a yearly release, or better yet, once every 3 or so years would be the best. This way you can really work on features that you wanna add to your distro, plus its cheaper in the long run for support costs. IE 1 release instead of 2.
My Gawd WTF...