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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.
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.
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?
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.
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?