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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.
So I tried to put in a bid, but I can't get my printer to work with my maching
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.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
Palm trees and 8
You're thinking of CentOS. Mandriva is a separately maintained distro. It takes a lot of work to test and package a distro.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
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...
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
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.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
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.