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Mandriva Up For Sale

Posted by StoneLion on from the sic-transit-gloria-mandrake dept.

The French company that creates and sells the Mandriva Linux distribution is up for sale. The news about Mandriva SA originally surfaced on a French Mandriva portal, and was confirmed by one of the potential buyers. Mandriva the distribution is a merger of the former MandrakeLinux and Conectiva distros. Mandriva the company is no stranger to hard times, having sought bankruptcy protection in the past.

3 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Poor Mandrake by gorzek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Whatever happened to these guys? Mandrake was actually my first foray into Linux. I remember it being quite user-friendly, it was just in the late '90's so driver support was dodgy. I kept it around on one computer or another for years until I finally gave up on it and went to Ubuntu. Just felt like it fell behind the times and was no longer the easiest Linux to use anymore.

    --
    Check out my world simulator thingy.
    1. Re:Poor Mandrake by hduff · · Score: 3, Interesting

      What happened?

      1. Poor management decisions after the IPO took the company far afield from its core business and sent them into bankruptcy. They did emerge (not a common things in French bankruptcies), but seemed to have lost their edge. They kept trying to modify a consumer-based business model (vice and Enterprise model) and kept failing.

      2. Their graphics always sucked. They were very cartoon-ish and not enticing the way, sat, Ubuntu graphics were, so it was difficult to have a "cool factor" to bring in younger users.

      3. Loss of vision. They initially wanted to do "RedHat Done Better", but decided to abandon RedHat's python-based tools for their own perl-based tools because, well, RedHat's sucked, but it took a lot of time, manpower and money to re-invent the wheel. They let "we-have-better-way-dammit" influence far too many of their decisions

      4. They lost a lot of their original core in-house developers and a lot of their community supporters because of their management decision s and choices. That meant they lost a lot of their momentum.

      I hope they find a buyer that will take them back to their original vision and revitalize one of the nicer distros. They had excellent implementations of the popular desktops, great user and admin tools.

      --
      "I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
  2. Mandriva is Prime Real-Estate by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Mandriva is Linux that works. Mandriva is some of the most prime real estate in th Linux world, from arcade cabinets like mine, to domain controllers, Mandriva is the easiest Linux to configure anywhere.

    Mandriva is the only Linux distribution where you can setup a Samba Domain with no interaction with the Console.
    Setting up a Kerberos realm backended by a LDAP server with Samba on top is easiest under Mandriva. They have a guy dedicated to just that. They have Wizards to create PXE Servers, DNS Servers, Mail Servers, and everything else. Mandriva has some wonderful assets. They just have not been marketed well, in the right hands, Mandriva could really spark a revolution in the Linux world.