Mandriva Up For Sale

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.

Comments

I love and use mandriva

[Anonymous Coward]

So I tried to put in a bid, but I can't get my printer to work with my maching

Re:I love and use mandriva

[hduff]

So I tried to put in a bid, but I can't get my printer to work with my maching

Then uninstall Ubuntu and use something that works.

Re:I love and use mandriva

[markdavis]

Hoyt, that is wrong on so many levels.... especially since I *KNOW* that Mandriva is your distro of choice (yes, Hoyt and have known each other for many years).

Mandriva is a complete, working, easy, slick, powerful distro and is better than Ubuntu in many ways. But it does not have the spotlight, nor the money. Not that Ubuntu isn't nice also, and does some things better than Mandriva. I would hate to see Mandriva die.

Re:I love and use mandriva

[hduff]

Forget to add "8)" to a post one time . . . 8)

Re:I love and use mandriva

[ricegf]

Having used Mandrake 7.2 as my very first Linux distro back in 2000, I recently tried out a modern version of Mandriva. The KDE4 desktop ran rings around Kunbuntu (IMHO), and would be my first choice if I used that desktop, but I'm still a bit partial to Ubuntu's Gnome implementation.

I think what Mandriva lacks more than anything else is a rich space-faring billionaire benefactor who owes his success to Linux and just wants to give back to the community. Where do we find more of those? :-D

Re:I love and use mandriva

[markdavis]

I have tried lots of distros and none of them can touch how well Mandriva integrates and presents KDE. It is their forte'. If *buntu could figure out how to have a nice KDE integration, it might just further hurt Mandriva. I also greatly appreciate Mandriva's work to have *all* desktops supported, easily selected, and consistently laid out, with centralized management tools that work the same regardless of desktop. It was, and still is, a good idea.

Re:I love and use mandriva

[mr_mischief]

Hear, hear! I'm posting this reply from an x86 laptop running Mandriva 2010 with IceWM. I'm currently pulling a torrent of 2010 Free x86_64 for my desktop.

I got tired of Windows 7, so I tried to see what would be a decent replacement for it on my desktop. I tried the beta of Fedora 13, and sound doesn't seem to work at all. I chalked that up to it being a beta.

So I tried the new LTS Kubuntu 10.04 instead. Sound works for some things, but not with many of the programs. I tried installing different audio services like PulseAudio and such. KPackageKit couldn't grab packages from the DVD. The desktop in question is very rarely hooked up to the Internet lately (long story), so that's a real problem.

I have a DVD for Fedora 11, so I could use that. I could grab 12 and see if that works. Or I could just go ahead and work with the one distro that has consistently worked with all of my systems since Mandriva 2006 (and worked with almost everything since Mandrake 6.0).

I figured since I've got two Mandriva desktops, a Mandriva server, a Mandriva firewall box, and a Mandriva laptop I might do well to use something else on my new quad-core desktop. It never hurts to have some variety, after all. The problem is, I just can't seem to count on anything else to just work.

Maybe I should put regular Ubuntu on it. I'm guessing Xubuntu would really fly. Hopefully they'd work better than Kubuntu, but they're all three supposed to be fully supported.

The box might still end up with Fedora 13 on it once the release hits. Maybe I'll even try OpenSuse again -- once every two years or so doesn't hurt.

Meanwhile, the distros I never seem to have issues with are Mandriva, Slackware (which is great if you have that much time), Arch (which is great if you are okay with the constantly rolling releases and have the network always available on the system in question), Gentoo (again with even more time issues than Slack), and Puppy (which unfortunately likes to auto-log you as root).

So Mandriva with urpmi, good hardware support, good DE and WM support, and a responsive bug tracking team seems to be destined to remain my distro of choice so long as there's still a company to put it out.

Perhaps it's time to buy the PowerPack again. Every little bit helps.

Poor Mandrake

[gorzek]

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.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[CannonballHead]

Just felt like it fell behind the times and was no longer the easiest Linux to use anymore.

It's amazing what having millions of dollars to throw into a software project can do.

To my knowledge, Mandriva did not have someone behind it with loads of money.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[betterunixthanunix]

What happened is that Mandriva could not out-compete Ubuntu when it came to user-friendliness, probably because Canonical has a magical supply of money that Mandriva does not. Mandriva also seemed to be targeting the wrong markets: they should have gone after the enterprise server market, where the money is, rather than the desktop Linux market, where there really is not that much money to go around. With so many no-cost Linux distros around, and with those distros becoming easier and easier for people to use, trying to sell a "power pack" is really not the best strategy, especially not in tough economic times.

Oh well, one business goes bankrupt, another comes to be. This is not the end of the Linux business, it is just the end of one of the well known players.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[Third Position]

I first used Mandrake 7.3, which I was really impressed with. But subsequent releases were a lot less tight, and eventually after they merged with Conectiva their releases became a total loss.

I eventually got fed up with having to switch distros every couple of years, from SLS to Slackware to Caldera to RedHat to Mandrake, every time the premier vendor went down the crapper, and just got a Mac.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[cgenman]

They went broke a couple of times. And as you mentioned, they fell a bit behind.

That seems to be the problem with linux distros... They start with some revolutionary idea or ideal. They get adopted, and their userbase grows and starts having expectations about how the distro functions. As more and more people users get added, the developers become locked into specific technologies and implementations. Instead of devoting resources to trying new things, they have to support their userbase's needs. Then a different upstart bunch gets another revolutionary idea, and try that out.

I loved Mandrake as well, and am sad to see how it has been languishing for years.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[characterZer0]

Slackware and RedHat are still going strong.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[gorzek]

Looking at it another way, Mandrake at least proved a user-friendly Linux was *possible*. Without that, we may not have had Ubuntu at all. The Linux community is indebted to the trail Mandrake blazed, but its time has long since passed, and all the money is behind Ubuntu now.

I don't mind that, as I like Ubuntu a lot, and have found it a remarkably easy distro to set up and use.

I suppose it's inevitable that Linux distros will be born, reach their peak, decline, and die. Diversity in the Linux ecosystem is a good thing. When (not if!) Ubuntu starts to slack, someone else will step up and replace it with something even better.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[ushering05401]

Slackware had the uncertainty of Patrick's situation, the perception that the base was allowed to become stale, and the removal of gnome from the officially supported base. RedHat had a nice little garden that they diced up with paywalls... No too hard to build from source, but still, it turned me onto deb.

Anyhow, the GP has a pretty valid point IMO.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[segedunum]

It's amazing what having millions of dollars to throw into a software project can do.

That won't be continuing for much longer, mark my words (no pun intended).

Re:Poor Mandrake

[jedidiah]

Meh. I dumped Mandrake for Debian over package management.

Ubuntu has a much better user community behind it that drives a lot of their tweaks. It's not just
about the Sugar Daddy. A lot of the end users are trying to find ways to make the distribution
better. This makes quite a bit of difference. It also helps that there is a framework in place to
accomodate them.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[Lumpy]

mandrake died the day that "mandriva 10" came out. before that they were on the cutting edge and the most useful and pretty darn stable. they were betterthan RedHat at the time.

Then the mess happened. Unstable, broken, etc.... People left in droves.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[schon]

Slackware had the uncertainty of Patrick's situation, the perception that the base was allowed to become stale

And those mean that it's no longer being supported?

Sorry, it really is still going strong.

the removal of gnome from the officially supported base

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I mean, c'mon.. if you're gonna bash Slackware, at least come up with something that's true (like that it's text-based install is intimidating to new users, or that it's all too willing to let you shoot yourself in the foot.)

Re:Poor Mandrake

[vlm]

What happened is that Mandriva could not out-compete Ubuntu when it came to user-friendliness, probably because

Ubuntu is based on the superior Debian distribution and Mandriva is a Red Hat based distribution? And Debian is a lot more active than RHAT?

Re:Poor Mandrake

[DarkKnightRadick]

Meh. I dumped Mandrake for Debian over package management.

And I dropped Debian for Gentoo over package management. What's yer point (oh yeah, the rest of the post)? Well said. (;

Re:Poor Mandrake

[DarkKnightRadick]

I mean, c'mon.. if you're gonna bash FreeBSD, at least come up with something that's true (like that it's text-based install is intimidating to new users, or that it's all too willing to let you shoot yourself in the foot.)

FTFY (and I use and like FreeBSD).

Re:Poor Mandrake

[hduff]

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.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[ushering05401]

I'm not bashing Slackware. If deb stable didn't give me everything I wanted for my servers I would be on Slackware.

The CentOS drama from a couple of months ago bothered me more than any of the things I mentioned last post about Slackware.

The things I pointed out all challenged the air of permanence that had built up around Slackware, though.

If I were going to knock Slackware my comment would be more about other distros than about Slack itself, ie: You can start with any major distro repos and build minimal servers with ease these days.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[Lord Ender]

Linux driver support is still dodgy. The kernel that ships with Ubuntu 10.04 has broken support for rt2870 802.11N wireless cards, and even broken support for NVidia 9500GT graphics cards, though the later is fixed in an update. WiFi users will still find themselves tearing their hair out, even with the latest-and-greatest Linux distro.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[LanMan04]

All hail the mighty apt-get!.....and screw RPM.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[gorzek]

Really? Maybe I've just gotten lucky, but I've installed Ubuntu on a few laptops in recent years and the WiFi worked right out of the box. One of them had an Atheros card and the other had an Intel card. Totally plug-and-play with no setup.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[armanox]

You realize the two are neither comparable nor exclusive?

Re:Poor Mandrake

[armanox]

And Debian is a lot more active than RHAT?

Explains why Red Hat is contributing so much code to upstream projects? And that Red Hat wrote a lot of tools that Ubuntu fell in love with (Network Manager, for example)?

Re:Poor Mandrake

[sconeu]

Mandriva 10.x was possibly the worst POS I've ever used. They didn't really get their act back together until the 2008.0 release.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[jedidiah]

Fortunately, I don't have to put up with what Gentoo tries to call package management in order to take advantage of it's community and documentation.

There are a number of parallels between Ubuntu and Gentoo. Mandrake probably finds it hard to compete against either.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[jedidiah]

Yes. rpm is not comparable to apt-get. That's kind of the point.

Debian had the whole package management thing figured out long before anyone else did.

Ubuntu added bells and whistles.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[hairyfeet]

How about Broadcom? A good 80%+ of the laptops that cross my desk come with broadcom chips, and after trying too damned long to get broadcom working on my Dell I said fuck that noise. I mean it is real nice they got Intel and whoever that other one is, but that is like saying you support everything BUT Realtek sound, ignoring the fact Realtek is the biggest onboard sound manufacturer.

But you look at the biggest selling laptops, which in my experience is the sub $600 models, and nearly every single one is running broadcom. I don't know if it is different now because I gave up at 9.04, but I know when I was trying to run Linux broadcom was definitely a hair puller.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[gorzek]

I haven't had a laptop with a Broadcom in it for several years, so I don't know how the support is these days. Sounds like Linux still has a ways to go in that area, though.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[bcrowell]

When (not if!) Ubuntu starts to slack, someone else will step up and replace it with something even better.

It's happened already. The last few releases of ubuntu have been horrible. Please, oh please let someone else to step up and replace it with something better.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[drinkypoo]

I have one old broadcom-based airlink 802.11g card, and it has always worked fine. Which is even more of a useless anecdote than what you're saying because I forget what model number it is, but not by much. IIRC I did have to activate the driver while plugged in.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[lien_meat]

I gotta say, I don't believe you. I have a dell, with a broadcom card, and I also have a different broadcom card from a compaq/hp laptop that died on me just outside of warranty. BOTH of these cards work nearly out of the box in ubuntu, and have since 8.04, which is what I was running on the laptop that fried on me. The ONLY setup required, is to activate the driver for broadcom wireless cards on the restricted-drivers-manager thing that pops up when you first run ubuntu. I have never had an issue with this since 8.04 (I'm currently running 10.04, and have used every version in between). Previous to 8.04, yes, it was an issue, and I remember compiling ndiswrapper from source to get it working, which was hell, as I was new-ish to linux back then. Interestingly, I also have a atheros 5006 card, which supposedly works great in ubuntu, and did for a while, but since 9.04, when they went to the hal-less driver, it won't come up from resume, drops my signal all the time, and sometimes I have to cold boot my laptop to fix it, after removing all power...ONLY in linux though, not in windows, doesn't happen in windows. Broadcom cards for me have never had any of these issues, so I am using it. Go figure. Can't speak for realtek, never owned anything of theirs.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[DarkKnightRadick]

Fortunately, I don't have to put up with what Gentoo tries to call package management in order to take advantage of it's community and documentation.

What? Gentoo has some of the best package management out there (it certainly beats out RedHat/Fedora and Debian).

There are a number of parallels between Ubuntu and Gentoo. Mandrake probably finds it hard to compete against either.

I wouldn't know about that. I've not used Ubuntu extensively (just enough to know I hate it).

Re:Poor Mandrake

[gmack]

Broadcom's Linux problem is Broadcom. They insist on forcing everyone to use their own crappy non open sourced drive that fails on all but a few kernels. Essentially they are trying to be like NVIDIA without being at all competent at creating drivers. It's a sad day when a company's windows drivers work better in Linux (NDIS) than their Linux drivers.

I had problems with my DELL laptop and Broadcom but I quickly learned the best fix for that is to just order an $18 Atheros based Mini-PCIE card from China and just swap the blasted thing.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[Macrat]

What's yer point

You should have used OpenSolaris.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[Rob Y.]

Actually urpmi (mandriva's apt-get like thing) is pretty good. And yes, Mandriva is more user-friendly and handles hardware better than Ubuntu.

But if you're dead set against RPM for some reason, you can use PCLinuxOS, which is Mandriva hopped up with all the non-free stuff the everybody downloads anyway. Plus it uses APT and synaptic. Their latest KDE4.4 spin just came out recently.

One thing about the Ubuntu/Canonical throwing money angle, though. Apparently Canonical's business model doesn't count on selling copies of Ubuntu. Because of that, they seem to be fine with people writing easy scripts for pulling down all the non-free codecs, etc. Mandriva has continued to push a 'powerpack' version in addition to their free and live CD versions. The 'advantage' of powerpack was that it comes with licensed codecs. It's still pretty easy to add the repositories for this stuff, but you have to know where to look to find the info. I guess for some people that translates into Mandriva not being free beer.

Oh, and then there's the GPL vs LGPL thing about KDE that's no longer an issue, but which was part of Ubuntu's rise. Of course, that's another 'business model' problem. Trolltech wanted to make money too. Now they've got Nokia as a sugar daddy, so QT and KDE are as free as GNOME. But apparently too late for all of this to help Mandriva.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[armanox]

Ubuntu just added (poorly it seems like sometimes) Red Hat's tools (Network Manager). And somehow made me like Linux a lot less.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[mrwolf007]

Just felt like it fell behind the times and was no longer the easiest Linux to use anymore.

It's amazing what having millions of dollars to throw into a software project can do.

To my knowledge, Mandriva did not have someone behind it with loads of money.

Mandriva is definatly on par with Ubuntu in terms of user-friendlyness.
Dont know about Canonicals budget, but given their popularity one might expect more kernel patches from their side.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[xtracto]

Yup, what happened to Mandrake was RPM. At least that was the reason I migrated to Debian and then to Ubuntu.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[the_womble]

I switched back from Ubuntu to Mandriva, and think Mandriva is still at least as user friendly.

Ubuntu has an edge in software installation, in that the GUI installer (synaptic) has better search, allows you to select suggested dependencies individually, and is less likely to throw errors (Mandriva often refuses to install stuff because it is checking for updates). The Ubuntu repo is somewhat bigger.

Everything else is easier to configure on Mandriva thanks to the Mandriva Control Centre. For example, I have network problems (I think some weird config at my ISP) if I leave the MTU at 1500. Changing this in Ubuntu is difficult, in Mandriva it just requires opening the "advanced" tab in the network applet and typing in the number I want .

The KDE version of Mandriva is MUCH more polished than Kubuntu.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[the_womble]

Mandriva was forked from Red Hat back when it was still Mandrake - more than a decade ago. This is entirely different from Ubuntu which is forked afresh from Debian for each release.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[hairyfeet]

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Did you forget the sarcasm tag? because if you are serious that is the funniest damned post I've read in years! bravo! Only a Linux guy would dare to say 'I don't believe you' when you say you have problems and IN THE SAME BREATH talk about having to fucking compile from source just to get something working and how the card he had working before don't work now! God damn that's funny as hell dude!

In fact, I'm gonna bookmark your post, just so when folks say "Oh Linux is ready for the desktop! It is sooo easy!" I can point them at this post! Do you HONESTLY think anyone but someone with a CS degree or an uber nerd with nothing better to do would go through all the bullshit you just listed just to keep their fucking PC working? And everyone tells you on the forums "Oh just get an Atheros, they always work!" and here you are saying if I would have done what everyone kept telling me to do I would STILL be boned!

Screw that noise, I have better things to do that spend all day trawling forums for fixes just because I dared to allow the OS to update. You know you have problem when the update notifications might as well be labeled "break Linux now" because you just know shit is gonna get broken when you use it! I gave up when after spending nearly three weeks trying different fixes a couple of hours a day I FINALLY get the damned card to work, only to have Ubuntu shit on it when I went from 8.10 to 9.04. Oh and the fix that worked before, didn't work anymore! What joy, what bliss, screw that.

At least when I started Windows after going from XP x64 to W7 x64 it took less than 20 minutes to apply the new drivers and be done with it. And of course I've never had a Windows update screw up my hardware, which was pretty much SOP with Ubuntu, at least as of 9.04. I don't think I could torture myself like that again to find out if 10.04 is any better.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[the_womble]

If Mandriva disappears I will go to one of:

1) A Debain derived distro like Mepis (Synaptic plus stability).
2) A Unity derived distro so I can keep the Control Centre
3) Suse for a Control Centre alternative
4) Arch if I can spare the time to learn it.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[the_womble]

You are comparing apples to oranges.

You should compare RPM to deb, and apt-get to urpmi (or yum).

Incidentally, you can use apt with RPM (not that anyone actually does any more).

Re:Poor Mandrake

[Kjella]

Dont know about Canonicals budget, but given their popularity one might expect more kernel patches from their side.

Ah, this old chestnut because I'm sure you DO know. Please do tell in which way the kernel needs patches to run better on a single processor, non-virtualized desktop. Maybe they're a lot more busy trying to fix the desktop environments. Or the actually applications/UI running on top of those environments. But no, keep nagging about not contributing to the engine when what people complain about is the driving comfort of a stock rally car (hint: it's not good).

Re:Poor Mandrake

[timbo234]

Ubuntu is based on the superior Debian distribution and Mandriva is a Red Hat based distribution? And Debian is a lot more active than RHAT?

No Mandriva was last forked from Redhat over 10 years ago. Since then it's been its own distro - one of the few distros left that is an original source of its own packages, ie. not based on releases of any other distro. There are now distros (eg. PCLinuxOS) based on Mandriva.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[Kjella]

I suppose it's inevitable that Linux distros will be born, reach their peak, decline, and die. Diversity in the Linux ecosystem is a good thing. When (not if!) Ubuntu starts to slack, someone else will step up and replace it with something even better.

Yeah, like Debian (1993), Red Hat (1994) and Suse (1994) all have died. Wait, that didn't happen and they've been around ever since Linux 1.0 was released in 1994. I don't fear that Ubuntu will die, I more fear they'll become a corporate / cloud distro and debrand the way Red Hat did with RHL -> Fedora. Because it's a proven fact there's money there, consumer Linux desktops on the other hand are still marginal in terms of revenue.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[kamochan]

apt-get :== yum
dpkg :== rpm

So it should read either:
> All hail the mighty apt-get!.....and screw YUM
or:
> All hail the might dpkg!...and screw RPM

Which, imho, are both false.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[gorzek]

Look at the long list of distros that have died out, most of them for lack of maintenance. Surviving for 10+ years is the exception, not the rule.

Linux would still survive if Debian, Red Hat, and SuSe all perished.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[lien_meat]

No, see, YOU missed MY point. I was ONLY saying I didn't buy that broadcom cards are still causing your problems these days, since I've not known one to not work since after 8.04. I'm only saying LATELY they do seem to work great, if not even better than the supposed open source ones like atheros. I never told you you should use linux. I never said it wasn't hell sometimes (it is), and I haven't had to compile anything to get ANYTHING working in 3 years. That's why I said I don't believe you, because I haven't heard of a problem with a broadcom card by someone who had seriously just clicked the damn hardware applet and told it to use the broadcom driver. you could be having trouble...that's very possible, I just don't believe you cause everyone I know has a broadcom card and hasn't has issues in years. And I'm not a dev, I don't have to care. Do you care that my touchpad won't scroll in windows 7 on my dell laptop? No, and that's fine.

Re:Poor Mandrake

[mr_mischief]

It's funny you say "if Suse perished" in a message thread about Mandriva being up for sale. Suse, as a company, is gone. It's part of Novell. A company selling is not necessarily the death of a distribution.

Red Hat, on a completely different sort of track, killed their unified Red Hat Linux distro and separated things into their product Red Hat Enterprise Linux and a community-driven desktop known as Fedora. So the company being intact doesn't mean the distro will continue as-is either.

Wonder why?

[MrEricSir]

I wanted to like Mandriva (or Mandrake as it was then called) but the configuration interfaces were just too confusing. But the real kicker was the lack of documentation and community support online.

These are two things Ubuntu has done right. I think it's easy to see why Ubuntu stole Mandriva's thunder.

Re:Wonder why?

[carp3_noct3m]

I don't know, back in the day when I started trying out Mandrake it was the Ubuntu of the time. (2000ish) It had gui installation and was generally easier to deal with that redhat or the other popular distros. Once you had it installed however, it did lack the substance of the other distros IMO.

Re:Wonder why?

[mrclisdue]

I began my foray into Linux with Mandrake, so I can *thank* the distro for that.

Not *bashing* 'buntu, but I can sense history repeating itself.

For the record, I use slack. Also, ftr, any *nix is fine by me.

just sayin'

Re:Wonder why?

[CannonballHead]

I think it's easy to see why Ubuntu stole Mandriva's thunder.

Yes, it is. He has a name and a net worth of about $225 million.

Re:Wonder why?

[andrewd18]

Mandrake was also my first distribution, and it's the whole reason I started looking for Linux distributions that had good documentation and stuck to standard naming conventions. I spent upwards of 2-3 weekends trying to figure out why I couldn't configure my sound card on the command line... only to find out that Mandrake devs had removed "alsaconfig" in favor of GUI-only "draksound", so all the tutorials I had read were for naught. I switched to Fedora, openSUSE, then eventually Gentoo, and now I'm happily using Arch Linux.

Re:Wonder why?

[hduff]

But the real kicker was the lack of documentation and community support online.

These are two things Ubuntu has done right. I think it's easy to see why Ubuntu stole Mandriva's thunder.

Mandrake had great user support/interaction. Mandriva screwed with that every release until they broke it completely.

I helped work on their documentation as a volunteer until their stupid management made it horrible to do productive work for them.

Re:Wonder why?

[hduff]

I spent upwards of 2-3 weekends trying to figure out why I couldn't configure my sound card on the command line... only to find out that Mandrake devs had removed "alsaconfig" in favor of GUI-only "draksound", so all the tutorials I had read were for naught.

Well, alsaconf/alsaconfig was available if you wanted to install it. Had you read the Mandriva docs or asked in the forums, you would have been using drakconf from the command line. That's been the default command-line configuration tool for Mandriva for quite some time.

Re:Wonder why?

[houghi]

I believe what Ubuntu has done right was the marketing part of it. e.g. sending out free CDs to people. That generated a HUGE amount of people willing to give it a try. Because of the amount of people, community support comes by itself.
Next to that running it from a live CD by default was a great idea as well.

He just used the AOL trick and it worked.

Re:Wonder why?

[jackspenn]

I think it's easy to see why Ubuntu stole Mandriva's thunder.

Are you referring to the pictures of naked women or the large pile of cash?

I started on Red Hat 5.1 in college, used newsgroups and a few other college students to share ideas. When I came home for one summer I brought Red Hat, Debian and Mandrake to show my dad and a few of his friends different Linux distros.

To my surprise, one guy really loved Mandrake, the rest just couldn't care less, all old school Bell Atlantic UNIX guys. But this one guy, Bill Reed, he really took to updating his skills, he took to it like a fish to water, in a short time, I switched to Mandrake merely out of the joy of having other Linux enthusiast to talk with. I loved Mandrake for that. I was twenty something years old, hanging out with a fifty-something year old guy who I could label as one of my best friends up until his passing.

Once we got more knowledgeable, we started moving to new distros. While I went to Fedora and RHEL, he went to SuSE. Phone company laid him off and he just started his own Linux consulting company. Both he and I tried Mandrake and then Mandrivia from time to time, but it wasn't the same, he would show me cool SuSE things and I would show him cool Fedora things, I want to laugh at taking days to setup SAMBA domain back then, but I am really grateful for the friendship which grew out of a Mandrake install feast.

Re:Wonder why?

[Javaman59]

Mod parent up! Great story... And it sums up a lot of the experiences of Mandrake mentioned in this thread.

Re:Wow

[courteaudotbiz]

Hey, I know this is Slashdot, but usually, posters will at least read the summary to understand part of the news, not just the title!

If you'd read the summary, you'd understand that they're not starting to sell the distribution to customers, but that the "company" itself is up for sale! Didn't RTFA, but that's what I understand reading the summary.

But this is Slashdot eh! Summaries are not *always* good...

So...

[KDEnut]

Mandribuntu?

Re:So...

[flahwho]

only if it has KDENOME!

Re:So...

[hduff]

using the gtQT toolkit.

Can some one tell..

[blackgod]

Can some one tell me what could be idea behind buying Mandriva for these two companies? I am totally illiterate on these stuff :-)

Re:But...

[Intron]

You're thinking of CentOS. Mandriva is a separately maintained distro. It takes a lot of work to test and package a distro.

Re:Wow

[courteaudotbiz]

Yeah asshole. If you'd RTFA you would understand that Man-Drive-A is selling sexual products for men that run Linux.

I think you didn't read the right article... it was on the OTHER tab of your browser, the one where there was no porn and where you posted this piece of anthology.

Translated Article

[Freshly Exhumed]

With Google Translate we can see that the MLO site is reporting that Mandriva,
the French/Brazilian Linux distribution publisher, soon may not be able to meet payroll. Two potential buyers (LightApp from the UK, Linagora from France) have apparently stepped forward to look at buying the entire company or parts of it.

To me it would be a pity if Mandriva ceased to exist as we know it. The distribution is one of the best out there for polish and
attention to detail, and would be a good corporate buy based on that alone. I've always felt that it would be a great "house"
Linux version for a big player like Dell, HP, etc. but clearly there are factors stopping such computer companies or other Linux
distributors from buying it.

Oh well, if they cannot make it then that's the way it goes...

Re:Translated Article

[ianare]

Looks like Linagora has confirmed ongoing negotiations ...

http://www.mandrivalinux-online.org/news/news-0-88+mandriva-a-vendre-linagora-confirme.php

Re:Translated Article

[Enderandrew]

Didn't PC Linux OS fork off Mandriva? And aren't the two still very similar?

Mandriva still has some loyal users, but they haven't done much in a business deal, nor software innovation lately. Instead of breaking apart in failure, why not fold back with PC Linux OS, or another major shop like openSUSE/Fedora?

Re:Translated Article

[AfterThot]

Looks like Linagora has confirmed ongoing negotiations ...

Can we now expect to see "Mandrigora"?

Value?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I've got to say, I don't see a ton of value in Mandriva as a business acquisition. They have some sales deals mostly in France and Brazil, but not enough to really make much in the way of revenue. Their distro is solid, but not really ahead of Ubuntu in any meaningful way. Their only real value as I see it, is the developer expertise. The business people seem to be pretty clueless and disorganized. I'm not sure it makes a lot of business sense to buy Mandriva for their distribution if you're looking to get into (or are already in) the desktop Linux business. Developers in the community tend to target the leaders, so they will always be at a disadvantage to bigger distros. What does buying Mandriva and using it on appliances or netbooks get you versus hiring people and going with Ubuntu or even ChromeOS? Both Canonical and Google seem willing and eager to partner. This just leaves the question in my mind of what another fragment of the Linux distro pie brings as a business asset. Maybe Canonical or Google or Redhat could buy them for the developers and mothball Mandriva while merging it with their own distro. That would make sense as a way to branch into the markets in those countries and get functional developer teams.

Re:Wow

[Enderandrew]

There is no porn on Slashdot? Man, am I in the wrong place!

Re:But...

[betterunixthanunix]

Mandriva forked from Red Hat many years ago, and has really been independent since then. They employ something like 70 people, and they do actually sell shrink wrapped packages (last I checked), and they have servers and advertising to pay for. The real problem is that they never had a firm grip on their market (the desktop Linux market, which is admittedly a difficult market to really get a firm grip on) and they could not compete with Canonical's magic money supply.

Re:I formally offer...

[daveime]

So would I, but I can't be sure they'd give me my $4.99 change.

European RedHat: marketing guru needed.

[AnonymousClown]

From what I can see here and a scant few other places, they are trying to be the European RedHat: Linux distro and support and other other services.

If someone in the EU had great sales people, I think they could turn this around (Mandriva has a history of financial troubles).

I mean, how many of you think of Mandriva as a company to offer FOSS enterprise support and service? Neither did I. Huge marketing FAIL.

Re:European RedHat: marketing guru needed.

[sznupi]

So they are essentially trying to be what SUSE already is? Not much place for two such players, I guess. Especially if one is, well, still largely German Engineerink; and where is Mandriva development happening?

Re:European RedHat: marketing guru needed.

[mr_mischief]

I always forget Massachusetts is in Europe. I keep wanting to place it somewhere among the original 13 of the United States. ;-)

Yeah, some of the people from Suse are still in Germany. Some of the Novell people I'm sure are still in Utah, too. It's all headquartered on the east coast of the US, though. Never underestimate the influence of top-level management in determining where people think of a company representing.

Re:But...

[morgan_greywolf]

Mmmmm...no he's thinking of Mandrake at a time when Red Hat Linux, the desktop distro, as opposed to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the enterprise server distro, was still around.

Mandrake, like SuSE and Caldera, started life as a repackaged Red Hat Linux (7/8/9) that used KDE by default, rather than GNOME. (Back then, virtually all commercial distros were in someway or another derived from Red Hat)

Caldera morphed into the SCO Group, SuSE got bought by Novell and became the only serious competitor to RHEL in the enterprise server market, and Madrake and Conectiva merged and have finally failed.

Now you kids can get off of my lawn.

wow,

[Youngbull]

I always wanted to own a distro!

Re:wow,

[blair1q]

You already do.

You're just not taking advantage of it by appending something to the kernel and offering it to someone else.

Re:But...

[Locke2005]

My apologies... my impressions of Mandriva were formed many years ago when it was Mandrake. At the time, it was much easier to install than Windows and any other Linux distros I looked at. But I obviously haven't kept up with it lately.

Now that's a new one.

[blair1q]

I've got custom software, proprietary software, free software, pirated software, and open software, but I never knew I had bankrupt software...

Re:But...

[morgan_greywolf]

I haven't kept up much. But I do test a wide variety of Linux distros every now and then on VirtualBox.

Re:But...

[zlogic]

Ubuntu follows a different philisophy than Mandrake. Mandrake added a control panel which wrote configuration files from scratch, was complex and sometimes borked the configuration, pretty much like Windows does. Early Ubuntu versions didn't have ANY custom configuration tools, except for dpkg-reconfigure, which meant changes were made from a single place and remained consistent, unlike Mandrake's DrakX which could potentially conflict with changes made from Gnome's or KDE's control panel.
Also, Mandrake had the whole OS supplied on several CDs, which was nice when internet was slow and expensive. Ubuntu's "download everything from the net" philosophy and a large package collection, borrowed from Debian, had a lot more software than Mandrake.
Mandrake seemed to focus more on aesthetics and ease-of-use instead of Ubuntu's improvements under the hood. This resulted in lower-quality software that often crashed or developed bizarre glitches, but the installer and control center allowed someone without Linux experience to use the produce, except for when something went horribly wrong and xfee or the boot process failed because of a broken config.

And In Other News...

[hyades1]

Womanyellingslowdownasshole is expected to join Mandriva on the auction block later this month. The two systems will run on the same machine, but never happily.

I'll ......

[irreverant]

buy that for one dollar!

bad news for KDE

[12357bd]

AFAIK Mandriva provides the best KDE oriented linux desktop. That's a problem for the linux desktop. Ubuntu is great, but monocuture is not acceptable, we need a good KDE linux desktop too.

Re:bad news for KDE

[andrewd18]

Considered openSUSE? When I was using it (around 11.0), their 4.x KDE was always significantly less buggy than 4.x mainline, and the distro is quite user-friendly. Otherwise Chakra's KDEmod for Arch Linux is excellent (http://chakra-project.org/about-kdemod.html)

Re:bad news for KDE

[AliasMarlowe]

AFAIK Mandriva provides the best KDE oriented linux desktop. That's a problem for the linux desktop. Ubuntu is great, but monocuture is not acceptable, we need a good KDE linux desktop too.

What about PCLinuxOS? It has roots in Mandrake, but has evolved its own character under TexStar's direction. It is primarily a KDE desktop distro (and was exclusively KDE until last year), and the KDE variant is still its flagship.
Although we're mostly Ubuntu/Gnome at home, I did have PCLinuxOS 2007 for a while on one of our PCs, and will probably install the 2010 edition into a VM for a test drive fairly soon.

Another nail in Linux's coffin

[Anonymous Coward]

This is it! This is the beginning of the closed source revolution. Today it's one distro, tomorrow the rest of Linux will collapse.

Re:But...

[CronoCloud]

I remember seeing a Mandrake box in a Wal-Mart in a small town in central Illinois some years back The tread where other Linux distros feared to, at the time...marketing to the masses. Not even Ubuntu has had shrink wrapped boxes in Wal-Mart.

Re:Wow

[Voyager529]

There is no porn on Slashdot? Man, am I in the wrong place!

Rule 34 and all that, but I sincerely doubt you'd want to see Slashdot porn.

Re:But...

[hduff]

Mandriva is essentially a repackaged Red Hat distro... how much can it cost to maintain? Too bad there aren't any alternatives.

It is not. The installer and package manager are all unique to Mandriva as are the admin tools (except for the printing tool in 2010).

It was as you say until release 7.x, then they began to diverge quite a bit.

Re:Wow

[Enderandrew]

I, for one, welcome our new erotic Natalie Portman and hot grits overlords!

Brilliant analysis!

[toadlife]

Surely Ubuntu capturing the remaining 33% of the collective 1.5% desktop market share that Linux holds will be the straw the breaks the camels back!

Mandriva is Prime Real-Estate

[Zombie Ryushu]

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.

Re:Mandriva is Prime Real-Estate

[thrift24]

Actually I'm pretty sure you can setup a samba domain in SuSE Linux Enterprise Server with no console interaction either. I wouldn't be surprised if there were others.

Eeh hoh, eeh hoh, eehhoheehhoheehhoh

[Hognoxious]

Eet ees net feur sell. Eeet eez a vendre, fils d'un personne fou!

Re:Wow

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There is no porn on Slashdot? Man, am I in the wrong place!

Only ASCII Goatse from time to time. Hmm, perhaps the occasional links to photos of naked digital circuits could count as well.

Re:But...

[sconeu]

It's still got a great installer. And I'd match urpmi up against apt.

Re:But...

[houghi]

SUSE (Not SuSE anymore since 2003) has a basis in Slackware, not RedHat. The fact that it uses RPM does not mean that the origins are at RedHat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUSE_Linux_distributions#The_origins

Seems it is my lawn, not yours, so get of it.

Re:But...

[sznupi]

At least with one distro your memory is failing you, old man ;)

SUSE is the oldest active commercial distribution, and second oldest active overall (only Slackware is slightly older; SUSE started as a modification of it and later built on Jurix (creator of which joined them), another early distro; Slackware itself was mostly a modification of SLS back then). It has over 16 years by now. It was a serious competitor, at least outside of the US, a long time before Novell.

Just because it adopted RPM (quite a bit modified by now) and Red Hat config style at some point, doesn't mean it was ever a repackaged Red Hat...

oh well

[Thraxy]

I guess I should go shop for a new distro then... just to be on the safe side.

Re:oh well

[ReinoutS]

Yeah. Because you know, when Mandriva gets bought, your Linux installation will stop working instantly!

Re:oh well

[Thraxy]

Well, I was running a half functioning beta. I don't really see much point in beta-testing a distro its future is uncertain. Thanks for your concern though.

Re:But...

[sznupi]

Adding to what others have said, I seem to remember Mandriva contributing quite a bit to KDE, at the least. Or sponsoring Frozen Bubble - this one has to be worth a lot for everybody, right?

Re:Wow

[nlayer]

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:But...

[Intron]

Mmmmm...no he's thinking of Mandrake at a time when Red Hat Linux, the desktop distro, as opposed to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the enterprise server distro, was still around.

I don't think so. Mandrake was the first Linux I installed on a PC. I don't remember what year it was, but you got a shell account with your ISP then. I had the Sparc version of Red Hat on a Sun box at the same time. They were always different. When I switched to Red Hat on the PC the directory layout was different from Mandrake. Also, I instantly got a worm (the Ramen worm) when I installed Red Hat. They didn't lock down services by default. It was pretty annoying.

Re:But...

[hduff]

Ubuntu follows a different philisophy than Mandrake. Mandrake added a control panel which wrote configuration files from scratch, was complex and sometimes borked the configuration, pretty much like Windows does.

The Control Center, written in perl, modified existing /etc/~ files in their default locations. Initially it conflicted with KDE and GNOME tools that also modified the same system-wide settings; that's been fixed for quite a while.

Also, Mandrake had the whole OS supplied on several CDs, which was nice when internet was slow and expensive. Ubuntu's "download everything from the net" philosophy and a large package collection, borrowed from Debian, had a lot more software than Mandrake.

Mandriva has always had on-line software repositories with more packages that could fit on a DVD and there are few packages that Ubuntu offered that Mandriva didn't.

Mandrake seemed to focus more on aesthetics and ease-of-use instead of Ubuntu's improvements under the hood. This resulted in lower-quality software that often crashed or developed bizarre glitches, but the installer and control center allowed someone without Linux experience to use the produce, except for when something went horribly wrong and xfree or the boot process failed because of a broken config.

Mandriva had a sometimes bizarre packaging policy that led to stupid versioning conflicts and things in non-standard locations. It also resulted in excessively fine-tuning many standard apps with unusual defaults chosen.

Problems with XFree were just that, problems with XFree. Every distro had the same problems.

Mandriva has also provided better-than-average hardware compatibility, with their usb.ids and pci.ids files usually being a superset of what other distros offered contemporaneously.

They tried too hard to implement cutting edge stuff that affected the init process and lot's of "fixes" for udev and such. That's what led to instability and was usually fixed by the .1 release, but they pissed a lot of people off in the meantime.

Anyone try Sabayon?

[treeves]

If so, what do you think?
I like obscure things, but there are probably reasons why I shouldn't.

Mandragora -- back to the proper name

[zooblethorpe]

Mandragora would be the better spelling. (Click the link to see why.)

Cheers,

Re:But...

[timbo234]

No he's right, Mandrake was based off the old Red Hat Linux distros (before Redhat Enterprise). However they've been their own distro, independently doing the heavy work of creating their own packages and writing their own config tools for over 10 years now. Quite a few distros are now based off of Mandriva, and it'd be a shame to see them go.

Re:But...

[timbo234]

In more recent times they directly sponsored the work on K3B needed to produce a native KDE4 version, meaning that everybody got a properly working K3B in KDE4 much faster than they would have without Mandriva.

Respects to Mandriva

[Pecisk]

While I'm Ubuntu/Debian guy already for 6 years, I have huge respect for Mandrake/Mandriva. It was first distribution who wanted to produce first class OS not only for geeks. Problem is - as far as I heard - that they management always sucked. No matter how brilliant engineers worked there, leadership managed to fuck up everything.

I would be sad to let it go, as lot of users still uses it (in my humble opinion, in Europe it's more popular than Fedora), but if it has to - respects, thanks guys for everything. You did really well.

(Partly) Blame the name

[Just Some Guy]

I know it's dumb and petty, but there's no way I ever would have installed something named "Mandriva" on a machine I control. It's like they deliberately picked it to make it as embarrassing as possible to say in public.

Friend: What'cha doin'?
User: Oh, just fiddling with The Gimp on my Mandriva.
Friend: I have to be somewhere. [departs quickly looking over shoulder]

I know we all laugh about focus groups, but a good one could've avoided this debacle.

Bad news, sad day

[advid.net]

I'm using Mandriva since 1999 with Mandrake 5, their first release. The version number was from RedHat. At the time it was a RadHat+KDE ready distrib.

I've never paid for it... maybe all users like me could be blamed.

I often had some glitches, but this distrib was and is still the best for my needs.

I agree about the poor community support and sometime invasive config file editing from gui assitants. However they have a tremendous control panel, nice package management tool.

I hope they will survive... without my money :o

they've missed the train

[batistuta]

I honestly don't see what has been Mandriva's place during the past year. I have tried it a few times and threw it away after few days. Let's start from the basis. Many people have moved to laptops in recent times. Now: why on Earth would install a distro which does not support any type of encryption? All major distros support encryption in some way. Ubuntu supports both whole disk pre-authentication or home encryption via PAM-login. Suse has something similar. I've been waiting for Mandriva long time on this, and given up. The last release messed up my system big time. I've installed from the latest live-CD and right away it offered me to upgade to a new release. It turned out that this release was an older one, so it was a downgrade rather than an upgrade. It messed up my system. The bug had been filed weeks before, but no one seemed to care to fix it. I've heard of Mandriva as a good KDE distro. But with LinuxMint out there I just can't imagine a competition. Besides, I somehow don't like the corporate feeling behind. Don't misunderstand me, I understand that people need a job and money. But as an end user, the Ubuntu, Mint, or Debian experience is a much nicer one. You have more of a community feeling. I wish the Mandriva team all the best. They revolutionized the concept of friendly Linux. And for that they get my hat off.

I'm sad

[Dollyknot]

First I tried Suze then I tried Coral then I tried RedHat then I tried Mandrake voila it worked.

This is in the early noughties, I think Mandriva went downhill once it sacked Gaël Duval.

I even bought my last upgrade.

I hope they survive.

Re:Glad to see 'em go.

[mr_mischief]

Slackware was there once. Red Hat was, too. Don't worry, something that actually has good hardware support will eventually displace Ubuntu. Actually, Canonical would be smart to be the buyer here. They could take all the great KDE support, the HAL, and the installer and open it all up for Ubuntu and contribute it upstream to Debian.

Re:Good bye.

[mr_mischief]

Unfortunately it's one of the better distros out there, despite having business problems. As a whole, the Linux community would be better served if, say, Vector or Ultimate bit the dust and the effort went to Mandriva.