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Mandriva Goes Out of Business
An anonymous reader writes: After struggling for the past several years, Mandriva has finally gone out of business, and is in the process of being liquidated. The company was responsible for Mandriva Linux, itself a combination of Mandrake Linux and Conectiva Linux. When Mandriva fell upon hard times, many of the distro's developers migrated to Mageia Linux, which is still going strong and just putting the final touches on its next major version (5).
Back in 2002-2004 they were a great distribution; based on Red Hat, but using the optimizations for the 586/686 chipsets they made for a solid platform for LAMP powered systems running on last generation hardware. The support was top-notch for subscribers and when I started pushing out BEOWULF type systems for our computational systems they were right there making it flow.
Farewell Mandrake/Mandriva...
He who is always at the bottom of the distribution list, but needs the information first!
They changed the name because of the threat of litigation, and they couldn't afford the proper set of lawyers to tell the plaintiff to f*** off, but they should've changed their name to something that ended in "drake", e.g. "Sandrake." They did have an opportunity when Red Hat abandoned their consumer distro and their shrink wrap product (the two were actually the same) - Mandrake should've stepped in and taken charge. This is when you need a guy who has some marketing savvy (not talking about a business school guy, but someone who knows how to grab press like Michael Robertson for example). They should've said "we have a solution to the problem with non-free drivers" or something like that, even if it turned out to be a hack.