It seems that they are doing much better since their latest Mandrake 9.1 was very warmly welcomed by users. In addition, their new business model based on Club subscription is certainly the best idea a Free Software company ever had to make money with Linux! On the users' side, the Club is a great tool to get and install - with one click - all the neat stuff that isn't available for free or difficult to find (such as RealPlayer, Flash player, many hardware drivers...).
I installed Mandrake 9.1 on many different machines and it's clear that it's their best distribution so far: I had extremely few glitches, and everything installed and auto-configured very quickly. In addition, their new desktop is very slick, in particular under KDE, with anti-aliasing everywhere, new icons (created by Everaldo, the designer of the new KDE icons) and so on...
I'm warmly recommending Mandrake 9.1 to all my friend and at work, because I found it very much more stable (less bugs) than Red Hat, especially on the desktop side (I found the X Window provided with Red Hat to be particularly unstable). When compared to Debian, it's really the same Free Software world and spirit, with 2 years of advance and a great desktop by default (yes CmdrTaco!!!). And I won't annoy you with supermount and other dynamic desktop options that made my life (and some friends') Microsoft-free for two years now...
By the way (1): it seems that Mandrake is also doing well at Download.com (look in the Linux section for you dudes who aren't under Linux). Much more than Red Hat and Suse actually.
By the way (2): the MandrakeStore has deeply improved since Mandrake 9.0 and I received my Mandrake pack pre-order in time.
The difference is that Minitel has been introduced in most French families by the mid-80s (the terminal itself was free and gave free access (for 3 minutes actually) to a few services such as the French white-pages and yellow-pages).
Regarding technology, the Minitel includes an asymetrical half-duplex modem: 1200 bps in downstream, 75 (!) bps in upsteam. But an interesting particularity was that it could be reversed to get 75/1200 instead of 1200/75.
The minitel-1 included a 40 columns black & white screen, with an extended charset that was heavily used to simulate graphism!
Later, faster models were indroduced (9600 bps), including color-screen and 80 columns mode.
Actually we - French people - say "l'effet Slashdot", not "l'effet de Slashdot". As a result the correct sentence is : "Bienvenue à l'effet Slashdot".
Re:"Beautiful Planes": Try the SR-71 Blackbird
on
Concorde to be Grounded
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
In my opinion, the SR-71 is not a beautiful plane at all. Actually I find it quite an horrible plane. Fascinating maybe, impressive certainly, beautiful no. And additionally it was designed as a "death engine" while the concorde is more like a peace-dove. But maybe it's only the vision I get from my "old-European" eyes:->
It's a tight vision to consider the UK as being the home of the Concorde: Concorde has been created as a cooperating project between France and the UK. It's been a difficult achievement but it was also the biggest recent proof that English people and French people can actually understand each others and do something valuable together (they would certainly benefit from doing the same thing for building Europe in the political area...).
But the first Concorde to fly was in Toulouse, France, with a French pilot which became famous for that. He took off the plane without any issue, did a loop, and grounded sooner than expected because of a heat problem.
There are two interesting things to notice about Concorde, in addition to the fact that it certainly is the most beautiful plane ever built: 1) the cooling system is using the plane's fuel! 2) the onboard computers are really really old design, with tubes instead of transistors!
A Concorde pilot also said that piloting a Concorde was exactly the same feeling as piloting a jet-fighter, that he could do exactly the same things with this plane, with hundreds passengers in the plane!
I'm sad to hear that the Concorde will stop to fly, especially without a similar plane to replace it.
Subscribe to the Mandrake Club, and you'll get access to an extended list of mirrors. It also offers other great features such as the instant download access to 50,000 Mandrake RPMS. There is also a feature in 9.1 that gives access to most 9.1 applications available at MandrakeClub (should be linked to the 50,000 packages stuff...!), just by entering login/password in a wizard... I tried to play with this feature today and it's a new way of experiencing an operating system, really. Need a new software? get it in the list, click to download and install, you get it...
What do you see as Mandrake's advantage over other Linux distributions?
Firstly Mandrake is certainly one of the most innovative Linux distribution. It also offers unique features such as supermount or the dynamic-device desktop. The hardware support is also one of the best available on the Linux distribution market so far. Internationalization is also a key-point because only 40% of our users speak English.
I have tested it today and it's *the greatest Mandrake release ever*. The new installation procedure is impressing, very simple to use, and the whole thing is so great on the desktop, very good looking, very natural to use. A usual it includes many many features. But the best is as usual Mandrake unique features such as supermount and the device dynamic desktop, which aren't in any other Linux distribution.
The best of all with this new release, in my opinion, is that the level of quality is very high. I couldn't find any bug yet - Mandrake improved much in the debuging area as well!
Great to see such a great product - it's really _the_ event in the Linux world...
> As a desktop user that wants to have a simple and easy distro, I switched to Mandrake 9.1 rc1.
Same for me - and I updated with latest Cooker packages which roughly gives a Mandrake 9.1 final, and I can tell you it's an incredible release. The 9.1 should be the best distribution MandrakeSoft ever released, with anti-aliased fonts every where, new _great_ theme in KDE & GNOME, incredible new icons (with the same look as Crystal icons...), and furthermore: very fast and stable! And I couldn't find any bug 8-/
is very likely to extend the adoption of Linux on the desktop. I tested the latest Cooker snapshot (it's frozen now), and it's an incredibly great Linux distribution: slick (new theme designed by Everaldo Coelho...), fast, full-featured and... extremely debugged. It seems they have learned much from the quality issues they got in Mandrake 9.0. Believe: this new Mandrake release is going to become famous.
I tested the latest state of Cooker (which is the 9.1 pre-final), and it's incredibly good. They have: - a completely new and redesigned (and simplified) installation procedure, never saw something so efficient and fast - a completely redesigned desktop in GNOME & KDE (it's called MandrakeGalaxy and has *great* new icons...) - anti-aliased fonts everywhere, this provides a great comfort of use...
There are also cool features such as NTFS partition resizing, WiFi support and others.
And the best of all is that for 10 days they seem to be only focusing on intensive debuging and frankly it's hard to find any bug left in this distribution!
My feeling is that MDK 9.1 is going to be a real bomb in the Linux world - it's so full featured, easy to use, powerful... I would call it "Ultimate"!
Of course yes! Look at http://www.mandrakebizcases.com - there is an impressive number of companies running Mandrake in their business there.
I also noticed today this interesting story at DesktopLinux.com - a guy working in a professional sound-production studio, for radio-broadcast, who has switched all the system from Windows to Mandrake Linux 9.0 and Ogg. He noticed that he had all his hardware working perfectly, and also noticed the quality of the MandrakeSoft support answers. This is a very interesting case, because it's out of the traditional "server" business case, more in the multimedia area, and definately shows that Linux is gaining more and more momentum in all sectors of activity. http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5847717353. html
MandrakeSoft Buys Bochs, LGPLs It Linux MandrakePosted by Hemos on Thursday March 23, @00:50 from the good-things-are-happening dept. Direct from the mouth of Gael Duval, we've gotten word that MandrakeSoft (Yes, the folks who make Mandrake-Linux. No, it has nothing to do with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. ) have purchased Bochs and hired Kevin Lawton. Now that Bochs is LGPLed, the Plex86 development can be speed up as well.
Wasn't Kevin Lawton employed for several years by MandrakeSoft to work on Plex86? Didn't MandrakeSoft bought the Bochs proprietary sources to release it in GPL?
What did happen? It seems that all mentions of this MandrakeSoft support has been dropped from the Plex86 pages !?!
I think you can keep this kind of s*** into your head. I had mostly *not any issue* with Mandrake since I started to use it (5.2) and I'm very happy with Mandrake 9.0 while Red Hat 8.0 freezes all the time on the same machines.
It's interesting to notice that Frozen Bubble has been designed by MandrakeSoft employees! Really, it's a shame that MandrakeSoft pays Free Software coders to develop free games:-)
Four years and half too late.
on
Ark Linux
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I think there approach is very smart in the Free Software community: in just a few year they succeeded to become one of the most popular Linux distro which very small means. For instance there are currently one of the most downloaded Linux distribution: http://download.com. It would be a pity that such great project disapears now. I wish them a very good luck and happy christmas.
Do you know the Shareware model ? Why an "OpenSource Ware model" would not be a smart way of doing business. Mandrakesoft have one of the most popular distribution and one of the best community approach
Re:Where are the $*#&@!!! real financials?
on
Mandrake News
·
· Score: 2
Did you have a look to these figures before posting? I'm not a specialist in finances but it seems the following figures they provide sound "standard" financials at least in Europe:
Slashdot Mirror
You can get you Mandrake box here (all official MandrakeSoft products).
It seems that they are doing much better since their latest Mandrake 9.1 was very warmly welcomed by users. In addition, their new business model based on Club subscription is certainly the best idea a Free Software company ever had to make money with Linux! On the users' side, the Club is a great tool to get and install - with one click - all the neat stuff that isn't available for free or difficult to find (such as RealPlayer, Flash player, many hardware drivers...).
I installed Mandrake 9.1 on many different machines and it's clear that it's their best distribution so far: I had extremely few glitches, and everything installed and auto-configured very quickly. In addition, their new desktop is very slick, in particular under KDE, with anti-aliasing everywhere, new icons (created by Everaldo, the designer of the new KDE icons) and so on...
I'm warmly recommending Mandrake 9.1 to all my friend and at work, because I found it very much more stable (less bugs) than Red Hat, especially on the desktop side (I found the X Window provided with Red Hat to be particularly unstable). When compared to Debian, it's really the same Free Software world and spirit, with 2 years of advance and a great desktop by default (yes CmdrTaco!!!). And I won't annoy you with supermount and other dynamic desktop options that made my life (and some friends') Microsoft-free for two years now...
By the way (1): it seems that Mandrake is also doing well at Download.com (look in the Linux section for you dudes who aren't under Linux). Much more than Red Hat and Suse actually.
By the way (2): the MandrakeStore has deeply improved since Mandrake 9.0 and I received my Mandrake pack pre-order in time.
The difference is that Minitel has been introduced in most French families by the mid-80s (the terminal itself was free and gave free access (for 3 minutes actually) to a few services such as the French white-pages and yellow-pages).
Regarding technology, the Minitel includes an asymetrical half-duplex modem: 1200 bps in downstream, 75 (!) bps in upsteam. But an interesting particularity was that it could be reversed to get 75/1200 instead of 1200/75.
The minitel-1 included a 40 columns black & white screen, with an extended charset that was heavily used to simulate graphism!
Later, faster models were indroduced (9600 bps), including color-screen and 80 columns mode.
Actually we - French people - say "l'effet Slashdot", not "l'effet de Slashdot". As a result the correct sentence is : "Bienvenue à l'effet Slashdot".
In my opinion, the SR-71 is not a beautiful plane at all. Actually I find it quite an horrible plane. Fascinating maybe, impressive certainly, beautiful no. And additionally it was designed as a "death engine" while the concorde is more like a peace-dove. But maybe it's only the vision I get from my "old-European" eyes :->
It's a tight vision to consider the UK as being the home of the Concorde: Concorde has been created as a cooperating project between France and the UK. It's been a difficult achievement but it was also the biggest recent proof that English people and French people can actually understand each others and do something valuable together (they would certainly benefit from doing the same thing for building Europe in the political area...).
But the first Concorde to fly was in Toulouse, France, with a French pilot which became famous for that. He took off the plane without any issue, did a loop, and grounded sooner than expected because of a heat problem.
There are two interesting things to notice about Concorde, in addition to the fact that it certainly is the most beautiful plane ever built: 1) the cooling system is using the plane's fuel! 2) the onboard computers are really really old design, with tubes instead of transistors!
A Concorde pilot also said that piloting a Concorde was exactly the same feeling as piloting a jet-fighter, that he could do exactly the same things with this plane, with hundreds passengers in the plane!
I'm sad to hear that the Concorde will stop to fly, especially without a similar plane to replace it.
There are great pictures of Concorde on:
http://benoit.rajau.free.fr/concorde.html
Disappointing? Did you try the newly released (and _great_) Mandrake 9.1???
Yes it includes mplayer:h p3
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/9.1/features/15.p
(list of packages)
Subscribe to the Mandrake Club, and you'll get access to an extended list of mirrors. It also offers other great features such as the instant download access to 50,000 Mandrake RPMS. There is also a feature in 9.1 that gives access to most 9.1 applications available at MandrakeClub (should be linked to the 50,000 packages stuff...!), just by entering login/password in a wizard... I tried to play with this feature today and it's a new way of experiencing an operating system, really. Need a new software? get it in the list, click to download and install, you get it...
Duval was interviewed today at Tweakhound.com about this new release and other MandrakeSoft projects:e rview.htm
http://www.tweakhound.com/mdk9/articles/mdk9_1int
What do you see as Mandrake's advantage over other Linux distributions?
Firstly Mandrake is certainly one of the most innovative Linux distribution. It also offers unique features such as supermount or the dynamic-device desktop. The hardware support is also one of the best available on the Linux distribution market so far. Internationalization is also a key-point because only 40% of our users speak English.
Worth a read!
It's extremely stable.
On their website there is now a link to all the 9.1 features, it's on http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/9.1/features/
The best of all with this new release, in my opinion, is that the level of quality is very high. I couldn't find any bug yet - Mandrake improved much in the debuging area as well!
Great to see such a great product - it's really _the_ event in the Linux world...
> As a desktop user that wants to have a simple and easy distro, I switched to Mandrake 9.1 rc1.
Same for me - and I updated with latest Cooker packages which roughly gives a Mandrake 9.1 final, and I can tell you it's an incredible release. The 9.1 should be the best distribution MandrakeSoft ever released, with anti-aliased fonts every where, new _great_ theme in KDE & GNOME, incredible new icons (with the same look as Crystal icons...), and furthermore: very fast and stable! And I couldn't find any bug 8-/
is very likely to extend the adoption of Linux on the desktop. I tested the latest Cooker snapshot (it's frozen now), and it's an incredibly great Linux distribution: slick (new theme designed by Everaldo Coelho...), fast, full-featured and... extremely debugged. It seems they have learned much from the quality issues they got in Mandrake 9.0. Believe: this new Mandrake release is going to become famous.
I tested the latest state of Cooker (which is the 9.1 pre-final), and it's incredibly good. They have:
- a completely new and redesigned (and simplified) installation procedure, never saw something so efficient and fast
- a completely redesigned desktop in GNOME & KDE (it's called MandrakeGalaxy and has *great* new icons...)
- anti-aliased fonts everywhere, this provides a great comfort of use...
There are also cool features such as NTFS partition resizing, WiFi support and others.
And the best of all is that for 10 days they seem to be only focusing on intensive debuging and frankly it's hard to find any bug left in this distribution!
My feeling is that MDK 9.1 is going to be a real bomb in the Linux world - it's so full featured, easy to use, powerful... I would call it "Ultimate"!
Of course yes! Look at http://www.mandrakebizcases.com - there is an impressive number of companies running Mandrake in their business there.
. html
I also noticed today this interesting story at DesktopLinux.com - a guy working in a professional sound-production studio, for radio-broadcast, who has switched all the system from Windows to Mandrake Linux 9.0 and Ogg. He noticed that he had all his hardware working perfectly, and also noticed the quality of the MandrakeSoft support answers. This is a very interesting case, because it's out of the traditional "server" business case, more in the multimedia area, and definately shows that Linux is gaining more and more momentum in all sectors of activity.
http://www.desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5847717353
A reference on Slashdot:
4 7&mode=nested
MandrakeSoft Buys Bochs, LGPLs It
Linux MandrakePosted by Hemos on Thursday March 23, @00:50
from the good-things-are-happening dept.
Direct from the mouth of Gael Duval, we've gotten word that MandrakeSoft (Yes, the folks who make Mandrake-Linux. No, it has nothing to do with Mandrake of Enlightenment fame. ) have purchased Bochs and hired Kevin Lawton. Now that Bochs is LGPLed, the Plex86 development can be speed up as well.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/03/22/18512
Wasn't Kevin Lawton employed for several years by MandrakeSoft to work on Plex86? Didn't MandrakeSoft bought the Bochs proprietary sources to release it in GPL?
What did happen? It seems that all mentions of this MandrakeSoft support has been dropped from the Plex86 pages !?!
For sure, but it would be a real shame to take that as a reason to accelerate the war processus.
I think you can keep this kind of s*** into your head. I had mostly *not any issue* with Mandrake since I started to use it (5.2) and I'm very happy with Mandrake 9.0 while Red Hat 8.0 freezes all the time on the same machines.
It's interesting to notice that Frozen Bubble has been designed by MandrakeSoft employees! Really, it's a shame that MandrakeSoft pays Free Software coders to develop free games :-)
http://slashdot.org/articles/980725/117228.shtml
I think there approach is very smart in the Free Software community: in just a few year they succeeded to become one of the most popular Linux distro which very small means. For instance there are currently one of the most downloaded Linux distribution: http://download.com. It would be a pity that such great project disapears now. I wish them a very good luck and happy christmas.
Do you know the Shareware model ? Why an "OpenSource Ware model" would not be a smart way of doing business. Mandrakesoft have one of the most popular distribution and one of the best community approach
Did you have a look to these figures before posting? I'm not a specialist in finances but it seems the following figures they provide sound "standard" financials at least in Europe:
a ncials
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/investors/fin