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Mandriva Juggles Multiple Codebases
jfruh writes "In the wake of its decision to cede control of its Linux distro to its community, Mandriva is trying a tricky balancing act: offering Linux products based on two different code bases. Desktop and OEM offerings will be based on the Mandriva distro, while server products will be based on the traditional Mageia codebase." Update: As babai101 points out the codebases were reversed in the original post.
From TFA "According to CEO Jean-Manual Croset and Director of Community Charles Schulz, the Mandriva server products will be based on the Mageia distribution of Linux, while desktop and OEM products will be based on the historical Mandriva Linux distro." Desktop and OEM offerings to be based upon Mandriva not on Mageia and server to be based on Mageia not Mandriva.
Yeah, no problems keeping those straight.
They hadnt a lot of problems juggling between those codebases neither. Not sure if Fedora is to Redhat Enterprise like Mageia to Mandriva, or is a totally different beast, but it could work as precedent.
This is exciting to see. Giving the community greater influence over the future development of the distro has put this on my list to watch. I've used Ubuntu and Fedora (laptop and desktop) for years, but I used Mandrake years back and would be open minded to doing so again.
Who cares that you don't care??
Whats the difference between desktop and server other than what marketing has tried to create?
Imagine having to support two versions of mysql, one on the KDE desktops and one on the backend server. Lovely.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
I love it when people do this: click through to read articles they claim they're not interested it, apparently unaware of how websites track reader interests. Every click on an article, going in to read it in full, is literally a vote for more articles like it. It's your way of saying, "Hey, I love these kinds of articles -- they interest me -- please post more like this one!" Of course, if you're afraid one click isn't enough, there's a way to totally trump that and magnify your vote for more articles of the sort: actually post a comment! That indicates a level of interest above and beyond, and adds more content to the site, which sites crave. The more discussion an article generates, the more sites love it.
If your idea here was to indicate how much you really want to see more articles on this topic, you've done good. OTOH, if you would rather not see more articles on this topic, you've just done the most stupid thing you could do to try to indicate that. The bean-counters don't take time to actually read every comment, they just count the votes, so what exactly you post, what you say in the post, is irrelevant. All that matters is that you posted, and people responded, generating even more content for them.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Your mom?
Parted Magic is useful for recovery partitioning, the kind that you couldn't really do on a hot install. I would like to know why are you so antipathetic to Backtrack, as it ships with some tools that other distros wouldn't. Wireshark, aircrack, all that stuff. You have mentioned so many distros, including forks of Ubuntu, some absolutely unknown ones like Pear and Zorin, but only mentioned Mageia by its' grassroots structure? That is not as important as the aim of the distro. The aim is to have a clean, minimally tampered with user-friendly distribution while still preserving some tools like MCC of Mandriva's.
I'm sure they could. However, I'm not sure they are connected with mandriva in any substantive way
Having used Mandriva (and Mandrake before it) ever since Redhat split its distributions I tried the 2011 version... It was a complete pig's ear of a release, especially if you want to integrate it into a shared network or use it for real work. The worst part (other than systemd and its intrinsic brokenness) is the default "Start" menu replacement. (Oh, and the WiFi is completely broken, the wired networking half so.)
Mandriva 2010.x was stable and worked very well and this is the basis for Mageia.
If there were anything they should kill it would be the "desktop" version, start with the old code and move forward.
As to the anonymous coward who wrote the essay on how bad Mandrake/Mandriva is, I'd just show him URPM, the distro installer (for 2010.x) and compare them with the other distros' solutions. They pale beside them.
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
The Mandrake Team created a dependency tool (urpmi) at a time when only debian did, and poor redhat users had to download dependencies by hand.
The Mandriva Team improved on the -drake family of tools, and came up with a centralized configuration panel : the MCC ; SuSE was doing the same ahead of 6 months, and poor debian users had to dpkg-reconfigure each packages by hand.
In all that time, it was still the same people doing the good job (Pixel, warly, fpons, and so on).
Now that they have all left (fired or underpaid), and are not contributing to mageia either, you should realize that you are talking about a completely different product which only retains the name and the history of its ancestor, with a freshly hired off-shore development team.
Even the Mageia Team is no more than a shadow of the original team, with former interns, and support engineers made software developers.
There is no magic is this world.
None. Mandriva = Mandrake + Connectiva. That's how it got that name - from their merger.
Why don't they use Mageia for servers and PCLinux, which is another Mandriva fork, for desktops?
Pear, at one point, seemed like it was trying to create a MacOS desktop out of GNOME3. It took GNOME3, which everyone at the time was complaining about, made some changes to it to make it look completely like OS-X, even w/ its own app store and everything. Only way one would notice the difference - Opera instead of Safari (which doesn't exist for either Linux nor BSD, AFAIK), and a few other apps in the docking table. But more recently, after they became Comice, they seem to have shifted to covering their bases by having separate distros for KDE 4.x - the desktop, netbook and even Plasma Active.
The things that I start w/ in most distros is whether they support networking - preferably wireless, but even wired? If they do, I'm willing to try them out further. Since the KDE team has put together a whole host of apps, I'm more willing to give that a try. I certainly hope Calligra picks up & does well.
Personally, the things that intrigue me more are the BSDs. With Linux, I've seen cases where unless I have the right combination of an OS version plus the relevant driver, it will not necessarily work - I saw that clearly w/ ALSA. Apparently, the lack of a device driver ABI in Linux - the way it's there in BSD - is an issue. W/ the BSDs, they tend to be less distro-happy, even though there are a few moribund distros there as well, such as Desktop BSD, PicoBSD and a few others. Since they tend to provide as many desktops as they can, you don't see too many distros in the BSD side, particularly if the only distinction is the choice of UX. It would also be nice to see Minix making some inroads, riding as it is on the coattails of NetBSD.
Why not combine forces w/ PCLinuxOS? Egos? B'cos that name at least seems more generic, and people might think of it as less strange, than say, something named Zorin, or Comice, or Mint, or Ubuntu, or so on.
Burocracy, the name that you use because "discussing with other and try to be democratic" or "planning before doing" is not a good term when you want to criticize people.
And you do realize that Mandrakesoft start in 1998 ? So when you say in the 1990, you are just saying it was good the 2 first year and that's all ?