FYI, unlike some other companies Mandrakesoft lets people download the ISOs as soon as they are finished. This means that people will have ca. one monat of time for downloads before boxes hit the shops. This doesn't seam to hurt our sales, and we hope that at least some of people who download the ISOs will be happy to donate some money for further developement of their favorite distribution.
Hardly compliant with your paranoic idea, isn't it?
Reality is much simpler: it's hard to find people ready to mirror tons of different ISOs and directories. If you are willing to offer your super-ultra ftp server as a mirror, feel free to contact us imediately.
1) "Bugs in RC1"!="Bugs in final"
2) We did the job as good as we could. Time will tell how good this was.
Personally I have a very good feeling for 8.0, quite oposite to what I fealt when 7.2 came out. Sure, there will be bug fixes and updates (first two being samba and kernel), but that's life.
FYI, there is no such thing as "bug free software", with exception of TeX. IMO software gets released at the moment when developers change color from usual greyish to pale green, not at the moment when "no more bugs exist".;-)
I would be very surprised to see anything more up-to-date in RH than in LM distribution (well, I'm sure one could find a few proggies, but definitively not important ones like X).
As for "download crypto" option, it's gone because it isn't needed anymore. "Crypto" has been legalised in USA, so we have no reason to omit it from ISOs anymore.
There is a world of difference AFAIK. However these differences are all in "bug-fixes" domain, and may not concern you at all. FYI, RC1 may be one day old for you, but it has been out since April 09-th
While IBM != WD, I would not recomend you to go anywhere near your computer before You buy a decent backup device. Have you never seen hardware burned by power spikes, lightening, pooring cola overt it and such? I guess not - good for you.
Now, linux or no linux go and buy that backup tape, CDburner, or whatever and make a nice backup of your data. All of them. Then sit down and think of a strategy how you will survive a total and unexpected destroying of your data (house on fire scenario), and start making regular incremental backups, and saving backup devices far away from your PC.
When this is done, come back and enjoy slashdot again. Peace with you.
I don't think that anyone really enjoyes these rising numbers, but what can we do?
8.0 is so much different from 7.2, that we really can't call it 7.3 (kernel, glibc, gcc...). It's even worse - LM changes so fast that it may have been more apropriate to go with +1.0 steps all the time.:-(
So what should we do? Call it LM Q1 2001 or so? LM 2001 + service packs?
Complately drop numbers? Would that be more meaningfull? Would that be "better"? I really don't know.:-((
Install LM 8.0 on some old 486 machine, let it start KDE (or gnome, doesn't matter), open star office, maybe netscape too... Then go to cinema and by the time you come back some of the progs may already be ready and waiting for you...
OK, you could go for some lighter GUI, and avoid real slowware, but the sad fact is: old machines are too slow for modern GUI software. So what's the point on installing the newest disto on it?
This said, there are some places where such machines would do a perfect job:
X-terminal. No need to install general purpose distribution on machine if it is going to be used as X terminal.
firewall/rooter: If you have cable or (A)DSL connection at home or in some small office, install a firewall-distribution on it. Mandrake is working on one, and I'm sure there are other out there too.
Civileme has been investigating this for quite some time, and he wrote about it on Mandrakeforum.
It looks as if WD has severe QA problems, and this time it got a help from chipset and a bug (or at least lack of workaround) in kernel.
Civileme even claims that WD drives just fake CRC, but it's difficult to say if there is some truth in this or not. One is sure: these beasts cause a lot of trouble.
I do not really care about Plan 9 (then again, why not), but a cheap game console with integrated network card, which could also be used as an X-terminal would have my full attention.
Even an console which would just offer me ssh-shell would be interesting, since most of the time I just use pine. X would be better though.
I'm afraid I don't agree...
SuSe has been doing this all the time with their Yast licence, and I'm not surprised at all to see them doing it again. They are also the only major distribution which doesn't allow downloads of the
latest ISOs as soon as new distro hits the road.
I have always been surprised by lack of care people pay to this kind of stuff when SuSe does it...
I'm not a Mac user, and I'm not a windows user either - GNU/Linux all the way here for the last five years.
If I only had money to buy that beautifull Mac cube with large flat screen, i would do it at once. Add a lila imac to make my wife happy.
Next moment, all the Mac software would immediately make palace for a GNU/Linux system, simply because I'm used to GNU/Linux, like it very much and have no reason for changing my OS.
I don't say that MANY people would do the same, but here you have at least one potential Mac buyer who simply doesn't care about Mac OS. Let's face it, Apple makes good AND good looking hardware, why wouldn't a GNU/Linux user buy it IF he has enough money?
I saw a report on rice+carotene on TV ca. one year ago, and a story went something like:
"this was all done with idea of helping poor countries, research was payed by tax-payers, and no-one will be asked to pay any royalities"
Very strange: i wonder if it is the same project? The one I'm talking about was developed in Europe (Switzerland if i remember it correctly).
If only this story would not require registration.:-(
It must have been a LONG time since you last looked at Mandrake...
While Mandrake-Linux used to be very open one year ago, we decided to turn this completely upside down, and have been working a lot on security for several months. We came a long way, and at the moment, LM isn't any worse than other big distros when it comes to security: IMHO, we already lead the pack in some respects.
The goal however isn't too be "one of the best", but to become "the securest mainstream Linux distro": with Jay, Vincent and Yoann on board, we are on a right track to succeed in this aim.
If you are reffering to totalitarian political system (usually called "Comunism") which troubled
Russia, Eastern-europe, and good parts of Asia for last 50 years, I must say that I am not avare of any country where this system wasn't installed in completely messy situation left after a devastating war.
I doubt it that 2-parties system would help much under such circumstances - i am even inclined to believe the contrary: in times of bad crisis, rigid systems break easier than seemingly more fragile ones. (famous "grass" versus "oak tree" comparison)
I can kind of live with small states having bigger influence than they would have in purely proportional system, but I really don't see why Floridas 24 electors couldn't split their votes, just as floridas voters apparently did: 12 for Gore and 12 for Bush.
The life would go on, and all this s* we see now would not happen.
I guess this will be modified as "flamebait", but
so be it:
IMHO, the real problem of US political system is that it is built in such a way as to minimise the
impact of any "third" party/candidate to a system, and ensure that no small grassroot party can ever grow big enough to challenge the two "big parties".
In presidential elections this boils down to one-pass system, where a vote cast to anyone but two main candidates is efectively a "lost vote". This year, for instance, people who voted for Nader but prefere Gore to Bush probably feel as
complete idiots (*)- and I have seen enough people who actually BLAME them for not voting for Gore.
In a two-round voting system, where two strongest candidates go in second round, unless one of them got more than 50% of the votes in the first round, Naders sympatisants would simply vote for Nader in the first round, and still have a chance to vote for Gore/against Bush in the second round if
they want to do so.
This ensures that:
1) Third-party candidates get their fair share of votes, and therefore more political power than in current system
2) President is hated by less than 50% of the voters who took part in elections.
I suppose that "Borda count election" could have similar impact, so I would have no objections to it, but unlike "Borda", two-pass presidential elections are already used in many states, while
I never heard of a state which uses "Borda" system.
----------
(*) I take Nader as example, because it has been disputed that his voters prefere Gore to Bush. I don't claim that this is true, but it is easier to write about Gore, Bush and Nader than candidates A,B and C. Please don't shout "Naders voters prefere Bush": that may be true, but it is completely irrelevant.
I would like to buy Amiga name and possibly
rights to AmigaOS source code, and do following:
1) publish the AmigaOS source code under GPL
2) make a really nice Linux distro under "Amiga-Linux" name.
If old Amiga funs get their hands of the newly GPL-ed AmigaOS and develop it further, I would
let them do whatever they want under name
"Clasic Amiga OS" or AmigaOS for short, and
any hardware they come up with would be allowed to carry a name basically at no charge as long as it passes compatibility testing...
Since I don't have much money... How about 1000$ for the company?
I don't know nor do I care too much about how good is a support you can get for other distributions, but I personally have something against seeing people unhappy, and so do LOT of other people at Mandrakesoft. And, yes - we DO care about desktop,
and we work very hard on helping our users (and so do they - many Mandrake users spend lot of time helping other users on our mailing lists and on forum).
Saying this, there are two more things I have to comment on:
1) "not beeing able to configure networking in Linux" is getting very unusual today. There is something weird with your hardware, or with your provider.
2) "not beeing able to install RPM-s" is even stranger. We recently got a new girl
in Sales depertement who never saw a Linux before, and she was able to install/uninstall/update RPM-s in a few minutes.
There is absolutely no excuse for "not being able to install RPM", sorry.
3) here is mandrake documentation:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/fdoc.php3
And you cen find more info on these adresses:
http://mandrakeuser.org/
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/flists.php3 (follow the links to archives)
http://mandrakeforum.com/
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, unlike some other companies Mandrakesoft lets people download the ISOs as soon as they are finished. This means that people will have ca. one monat of time for downloads before boxes hit the shops. This doesn't seam to hurt our sales, and we hope that at least some of people who download the ISOs will be happy to donate some money for further developement of their favorite distribution.
Hardly compliant with your paranoic idea, isn't it?
Reality is much simpler: it's hard to find people ready to mirror tons of different ISOs and directories. If you are willing to offer your super-ultra ftp server as a mirror, feel free to contact us imediately.
And I told Kadjo about diference between kernel and Xfree yesterday. .-) Don't worry, it's still April 2001 and 2.4.3 kernel.
Berto, Berto...
;-)
1) "Bugs in RC1"!="Bugs in final"
2) We did the job as good as we could. Time will tell how good this was.
Personally I have a very good feeling for 8.0, quite oposite to what I fealt when 7.2 came out. Sure, there will be bug fixes and updates (first two being samba and kernel), but that's life.
FYI, there is no such thing as "bug free software", with exception of TeX. IMO software gets released at the moment when developers change color from usual greyish to pale green, not at the moment when "no more bugs exist".
I would be very surprised to see anything more up-to-date in RH than in LM distribution (well, I'm sure one could find a few proggies, but definitively not important ones like X). As for "download crypto" option, it's gone because it isn't needed anymore. "Crypto" has been legalised in USA, so we have no reason to omit it from ISOs anymore.
We are just testing to see if two big announcements in one week can bring complete internet infrastructure down. LOL! .-)
There is a world of difference AFAIK. However these differences are all in "bug-fixes" domain, and may not concern you at all. FYI, RC1 may be one day old for you, but it has been out since April 09-th
Just wait untill you see our new "MandrakeSecurity", you may change your mind about the firewalling and/or "servers" part. .-)
Now, linux or no linux go and buy that backup tape, CDburner, or whatever and make a nice backup of your data. All of them. Then sit down and think of a strategy how you will survive a total and unexpected destroying of your data (house on fire scenario), and start making regular incremental backups, and saving backup devices far away from your PC.
When this is done, come back and enjoy slashdot again. Peace with you.8.0 is so much different from 7.2, that we really can't call it 7.3 (kernel, glibc, gcc...). It's even worse - LM changes so fast that it may have been more apropriate to go with +1.0 steps all the time. :-(
So what should we do? Call it LM Q1 2001 or so? LM 2001 + service packs? Complately drop numbers? Would that be more meaningfull? Would that be "better"? I really don't know.Install LM 8.0 on some old 486 machine, let it start KDE (or gnome, doesn't matter), open star office, maybe netscape too... Then go to cinema and by the time you come back some of the progs may already be ready and waiting for you...
OK, you could go for some lighter GUI, and avoid real slowware, but the sad fact is: old machines are too slow for modern GUI software. So what's the point on installing the newest disto on it?
This said, there are some places where such machines would do a perfect job:Civileme has been investigating this for quite some time, and he wrote about it on Mandrakeforum. It looks as if WD has severe QA problems, and this time it got a help from chipset and a bug (or at least lack of workaround) in kernel.
Here are the stories:- Numerical Analysis & the Walrus
- What Now? WINDisks, of course
- Is this Computer Science or Voodoo?
Civileme even claims that WD drives just fake CRC, but it's difficult to say if there is some truth in this or not. One is sure: these beasts cause a lot of trouble.Even an console which would just offer me ssh-shell would be interesting, since most of the time I just use pine. X would be better though.
I'm afraid I don't agree... SuSe has been doing this all the time with their Yast licence, and I'm not surprised at all to see them doing it again. They are also the only major distribution which doesn't allow downloads of the latest ISOs as soon as new distro hits the road. I have always been surprised by lack of care people pay to this kind of stuff when SuSe does it...
If I only had money to buy that beautifull Mac cube with large flat screen, i would do it at once. Add a lila imac to make my wife happy.
Next moment, all the Mac software would immediately make palace for a GNU/Linux system, simply because I'm used to GNU/Linux, like it very much and have no reason for changing my OS.
I don't say that MANY people would do the same, but here you have at least one potential Mac buyer who simply doesn't care about Mac OS. Let's face it, Apple makes good AND good looking hardware, why wouldn't a GNU/Linux user buy it IF he has enough money?
"this was all done with idea of helping poor countries, research was payed by tax-payers, and no-one will be asked to pay any royalities"
Very strange: i wonder if it is the same project? The one I'm talking about was developed in Europe (Switzerland if i remember it correctly). If only this story would not require registration.Personally, or a company?
.-)
Personally, I'm encouraging him a lot, and we had a discussion about Plex once - i hope he got something out of it.
As for the company... Well, we are feeding him, so that he can concentrate on coding. Seems to work quite nicely
Go figure ,->
It must have been a LONG time since you last looked at Mandrake...
While Mandrake-Linux used to be very open one year ago, we decided to turn this completely upside down, and have been working a lot on security for several months. We came a long way, and at the moment, LM isn't any worse than other big distros when it comes to security: IMHO, we already lead the pack in some respects.
The goal however isn't too be "one of the best", but to become "the securest mainstream Linux distro": with Jay, Vincent and Yoann on board, we are on a right track to succeed in this aim.
If you are reffering to totalitarian political system (usually called "Comunism") which troubled
Russia, Eastern-europe, and good parts of Asia for last 50 years, I must say that I am not avare of any country where this system wasn't installed in completely messy situation left after a devastating war.
I doubt it that 2-parties system would help much under such circumstances - i am even inclined to believe the contrary: in times of bad crisis, rigid systems break easier than seemingly more fragile ones. (famous "grass" versus "oak tree" comparison)
I can kind of live with small states having bigger influence than they would have in purely proportional system, but I really don't see why Floridas 24 electors couldn't split their votes, just as floridas voters apparently did: 12 for Gore and 12 for Bush. The life would go on, and all this s* we see now would not happen.
I guess this will be modified as "flamebait", but
so be it:
IMHO, the real problem of US political system is that it is built in such a way as to minimise the
impact of any "third" party/candidate to a system, and ensure that no small grassroot party can ever grow big enough to challenge the two "big parties".
In presidential elections this boils down to one-pass system, where a vote cast to anyone but two main candidates is efectively a "lost vote". This year, for instance, people who voted for Nader but prefere Gore to Bush probably feel as
complete idiots (*)- and I have seen enough people who actually BLAME them for not voting for Gore.
In a two-round voting system, where two strongest candidates go in second round, unless one of them got more than 50% of the votes in the first round, Naders sympatisants would simply vote for Nader in the first round, and still have a chance to vote for Gore/against Bush in the second round if
they want to do so.
This ensures that:
1) Third-party candidates get their fair share of votes, and therefore more political power than in current system
2) President is hated by less than 50% of the voters who took part in elections.
I suppose that "Borda count election" could have similar impact, so I would have no objections to it, but unlike "Borda", two-pass presidential elections are already used in many states, while
I never heard of a state which uses "Borda" system.
----------
(*) I take Nader as example, because it has been disputed that his voters prefere Gore to Bush. I don't claim that this is true, but it is easier to write about Gore, Bush and Nader than candidates A,B and C. Please don't shout "Naders voters prefere Bush": that may be true, but it is completely irrelevant.
Sure as hell I'm not gonna waste my time at beta testing propriatery closed-source program.
Let them pay for beta testers.
I would like to buy Amiga name and possibly
rights to AmigaOS source code, and do following:
1) publish the AmigaOS source code under GPL
2) make a really nice Linux distro under "Amiga-Linux" name.
If old Amiga funs get their hands of the newly GPL-ed AmigaOS and develop it further, I would
let them do whatever they want under name
"Clasic Amiga OS" or AmigaOS for short, and
any hardware they come up with would be allowed to carry a name basically at no charge as long as it passes compatibility testing...
Since I don't have much money... How about 1000$ for the company?
in a month or two shops will run out of the 7.2 they have now, and ask for "refill". Guess what they'll get .-)
I don't know nor do I care too much about how good is a support you can get for other distributions, but I personally have something against seeing people unhappy, and so do LOT of other people at Mandrakesoft. And, yes - we DO care about desktop,
and we work very hard on helping our users (and so do they - many Mandrake users spend lot of time helping other users on our mailing lists and on forum).
Saying this, there are two more things I have to comment on:
1) "not beeing able to configure networking in Linux" is getting very unusual today. There is something weird with your hardware, or with your provider.
2) "not beeing able to install RPM-s" is even stranger. We recently got a new girl
in Sales depertement who never saw a Linux before, and she was able to install/uninstall/update RPM-s in a few minutes.
There is absolutely no excuse for "not being able to install RPM", sorry.
3) here is mandrake documentation:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/fdoc.php3
And you cen find more info on these adresses:
http://mandrakeuser.org/
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/flists.php3 (follow the links to archives)
http://mandrakeforum.com/