Yes, that version should really have been called "desktop", because that is what it is good for.
No developement tools, no servers.
In next edition, we have to do something about it: either change name, or put back the devel+server stuff.
First, I work for Mandrakesoft, so I'm both
biased and know a bit more about what is
going on at Mandrake.
Biased part is: LM version you can buy at WM today is good, in fact it is much better than many other Linux distros out there. Even Roblimo had to admitt that "he had no problems with KDE2".
informative part is: Primary reason why we continued the developement even after shipping the ISO-s for CD-s was the feeling that people will bitch about KDE2-beta, even if there were absolutely no difference between the version we ship and the "final" KDE2.
The "RC1" was idea of our marketing: They were afraid that sales of 7.1 version would be gone
as soon as we announce that 7.2 is finished, so
we called it Release-candidate. Then, when we rolled out what is called "download edition" today (and which should have been called 7.2.1, I suppose), they got all scared that folks will think that we shipped a beta.
While Marketing drones are marketing drones
(and I can tell you one: OUR marketing folks are actaully wery reasonable, and really try hard to somehow put together wishes of users and developers on one and re-salers on other side.),
what I don't understand is apparent easines with which Slashdot readers start bashing a Linux distro whenever given a chance to do so.
OK, let me be completely open: For the first time
EVER, one Linux distribution puts updated product
for download, even before the distro hits the shops. Is there something really badly wrong with the version you can buy in the shop? NO.
Beta-testing period for 7.2 has been extremely long, and while 16 more days helped us clean some more bugs, the product you ca n buy in Wal-Mart today is NOT a "beta" or pre-release quality.
FYI, I'm running that version right now, Roblimo has run it succesfully, and although one would not say it from multitude of "beautifful" responses one can read here, most of the people whop tried the distro are very happy with it.
So, one would expect to see a crowd of happy slashdoters celebrating the fact that there actually exists a company which is not afraid of
putting a newer version on the net than on CD-s, but instead all I see is "they are trying to frame us", and "LM sux" all over the/.
(Thx, I guess you have just ruined everything i tried to build during last months. I guess, marketing was right: doing ir SuSe-way is much better idea than doing the distro in open way, as we do. As soon as you try to open-up, tell the truth, and count on human inteligence to understand that you REALLY do all you can, all you get is lot of bashing. )
I have been a passionate/. reader for long time, and I must say I am really surprised: what happened with bunch of friendly nerds that once lived here? All gone to greaner pastures, or what?
Of coarse it died. mandrakeforum is just a
poor little machine with news for a few hard-core mandrake-fans.
It can take several thousends of visitors/day, but not the hoard of slashdoters. One day....-)
Since I'm already writing this: I want to thank Roblimo for holding back a story until today.
I am rather sure that he got a word on it at friday, because I got it at friday evening
(cute, as if I didn't know already...)
So at sutherday, I decided to give the hard core of mandrake users a chance to download 7.2 before slashdot effect kills all the mirrors, and I'm really happy that/. did not strike imediately.
Thx, Rob!
Well, I'm the guy who wrote the article on mandrakeforum, and in case it isn't clear:
I don't care how good/bad is RH: I wouldn't work for Mandrakesoft if I wouldn't think we are doing a better job, but that particular story about counting bugs in bugzilla was below all standards and may have hurt the Linux as a whole, not only RedHat.
As for LM 7.2, it is not "potentially better than SuSe", it is definitively going to be better than
whatever SuSe can come up with.;->
(The rest is just my very private observation, and not in any way Mandrakesoft's official statement: I'm not very fond of SuSe, and newer was. Even some folk at Mandrakesoft may disagree with me, and I am sure many slashdot readers do as well..)
There are two things which always bothered me about SuSe: Yast licence and non-standard way of setting-up the filesystem.
Then I learned more about it (well, I lived in Austria...), and found out there were more things
that bother me. For instance, it seems that they aren't very eager to let people download the newest version, so they simply don't put it on ftp-servers. Also, they do not seam to care about licances at all, so last time I looked free- and non-free software was all mixed-up.
Ha, I found a Mandrakesoft-user here!.-)
Let me see... I just installed the LM 7.2 beta3, and I can choose between KDE2, Gnome, WindowMaker, XFce, IceWM, Sawfish or Fvwm1 on login. And this is just a vanila instalation (i asked for additional WM-s though).
Yup, I'm not going to use XFce (WINDOW MAKER FOREVER), but I would kill to make sure you can use it.
Waht a winning combination: We'll get a device with quality of motorolas phones, with Palms pricetag!
Sorry, I KNOW this is troll, but I simply can not forget the face of my friend Patricia when she realised that her "exciting", "cute", "wonderfull" (and quite expensive too) new little Motorola phone, and not beeing able to get a connection at places where other phones would work withouth any problems. That was like 1.5 years ago, and I still see the same model (now for free) in the shops...
But ogg vorbis is here, you don't have to wait for it anymore. Support for ogg will be included in Linux Mandrake 7.2, which is currently in beta-testing phase, and I am quite sure other distros will suport it soon if they don't already.
It works very nicely - i have a HD full of ogg-s...
We needed quite a lot of work to get him avare
that Mandrake does things somewhat differently... Now he does a similar mistake with debian.
Fun. He will gett a lot of JB awards, if he goes on like this...
First I thought that he simply has something against Mandrakesoft, but now... I don't know, maybe he has no time to do a homework on distros he does not use. It is strange, when one knows that he is the author of the "Linux Administrators Security Guide".
(I know I will end up somewhere on the bottom of the line of people crying "outrage", but I can not help it.)
Since I work for an free-software company, I'm not fond of NDA-s at all, but I can kind-of understand the "need" for these bestias. You work for a company, they pay you, and they do not want you to run away and produce their next product for the concurence. Fair enough...
However, signing a NDA withouth getting ANYTHING in return (are interviews considered "precious" nowdays?) is one of the most stupendeous ideas I ever heard about.
Also, considering the amount of stupid PATENTS one sees nowdays, I can imagine what kind of common-knowledge informations could a paranoid company consider "propriatery"... Brr, I do not even want to think about it.
There are some Linux distros which are more KDE-centric (RedHat, TurboLinux), and other which are more GNOME-centric (Mandrake, SuSe, Corel), and later have much higher presence on the desktop. This will not change overnight.
In a month or so, you'll see KDE2 announcement, and lot of folks wil shout "end of GNOME".
It would not surprise me to see a KDE-backing group emerging either...
Ah well, it is kind of fun, so let it be. Besides, even if GNOME does become a "winner" one day, so what? I suppose Qt- (i.e KDE-) based progs will start using the GNOME infrastructure where nessesary, and life will go on.
As for the Qt licence, there is nothing dangerous in it anymore, and I have even heard rumors of new licence which is supposed to be GPL-compatible. We'll see..
So, Gnome gets official Sun and HP blessing. Good, but "so what"?
Both KDE and GNOME are doing quite nicely (with or withouth HP/SUN), and both have their appeal. HP/Sun backing one or the other will not change much, I think. And there is backing for KDE too: SuSe does it, Mandrakesoft does it, and I'm sure other companies do or will do it in the future too. The only thing which COULD kill a KDE at the moment would be some wide-spread mad-programmers desease among KDE developers: rather unlikely in my opinion.
One is sure: Gnome vs. KDE wars are going in the next round. Some people will prefere GNOME, other will stick with KDE, there will be a cute flamewar to talk about during the cofee break...
Is this bad? No. As I said, we have something to talk about, both Gnome and KDE get a lot of free publicity, and all are happy. And, in the meantime we'll get TWO wonderfull desktops, so that is fine with me..-)
It is a difficult task: once there is a source code of a package some good programer considers "interesting", the only way to kill that particular software would be to kill all the programers willing to work on it.
Then you would have to hount ALL the copies of the source-code on the earth and burry them in the dirth... And a few months later someone would dig it out again. I do not claim that AFS will re-emerge as a next big thing now, but if there is freely available code, someone will hack on it.
Since there seams to be a base of users ready to actually PAY for maintainance, it is very likely that some programmers may even end-up beeing payed to work on AFS in the future... It does not look so dead to me...
alternatively, you take the next Linux distro that comes along and you have it all... Want to have a shameless plug? OK, than you will have it.-)
All of the Helix Gnome 1.2 has been integrated in Linux-Mandrake "cooker" (i.e. experimental) distro, and will be in shops in a few months. In a meantime, one can use "urpmi" or its X counterpart "RpmDrake" to get all you need installed in one step.
I am quite sure that debian users enjoy about the same level of easines with their "apt-get" and co., so things are far less problematic than you think.
I work for Mandrakesoft, and contrary to what one could expect, we are actually happy to have a good concurence: It helps us make our own distribution more usable. Sure we are working on becomming a "number one", but we want to achieve this goal by beeing the best, and not by seeing other Linux distros die.
And debian has a particular role: it is a concience of the whole Linux industry. Glad to see them getting this award - keep on with the good work!
Actually, on Linux-Mandrake all you have to do is use "urpmi" for installing packages, and you do not have to think about dependencies anymore. Yes, right - rpm based system have their own versions of "apt-get" too. In case you prefere to click your way around, both "rpmdrake" and "MandrakeUpdate" are urpmi avare. I do not think that installing/upgrading can be much easier then that.
Mandrake has released security update for kernel some time ago. 2.2.15 had some big holes - upgrade to 2.2.16 at once. The same is true for all other distros, for instance RedHat or SuSe
His assertion is that Open Source systems such as Linux are developed in too chaotic a system to ever reach a trusted state.
It may be true that lot of free software starts its life chaotically. However, claiming that big, succesful projects are developed chaotically is complete nonsense. The proces of specifying the direction in which free software moves is different from what people working in traditional software developement may be used to. Maybe these new organisatory schemes are difficult for Dr. Spafford to understand, but claiming that developement of "Apache", "Gnome", "KDE"... are chaotic is complete nonsense.
As for the question wether Open-source project can become "thrusted" or not, this depends on only two factors:
Goals of the project
Your personal definition of "trusted system"
If these two are in synch, chances are that Open source project will reach the state where you can trust it much faster than a project coded in traditional way.
Trust me - you are not the only one annoyed by such glitches. We are working on this problem, and quality controle has impoved a lot since I joined the company... Yup, we are (still.-) not perfect, but we are heading in a right direction. cu Denis
Test the bloody distro. Just install the server with ML 7.1, play with it for some time, then we can talk again. Otherwise you will keep telling me that we "concentrate only on X" , and I will start yelling at you.:-(
As for the second point:
I am not going to test these tools on other distros. However, everything we do is GPL, and if you want to test anything on other distros, or help with coding, or assure that everything we do works on every other distro, you are welcome to join the developers team.
There are at least two tools for which I know that they are beeing developed together with users/developers of other distributions: our security tool, and harddrake. AFAIK, we have recently contributed quite a lot to Webmin too.
Unlike some other distros out there, we try sticking to standards. We dream of the world where binaries for one distro will work on all of them.
You do not really expect us to make sure all our tools work flawlesly on other distros, do you? In your world, it seams, developing under GPL licence is not enough, right? We should spend all our time debugging other distros, I suppose...
Yup. New kernel is in cooker, and I hope we will finaly announce the upgrade today and make it available as "first official upgrade" for 7.1. Stupid timing:-(
Well, one of the beauties of a Linux is that everyone is free to choose whatever suits him the best. Mandrake (i work for Mandrakesoft now) focuses on "making the system easier to use", and the most visible component is fine-tuning the GUI - that is why press releases usually concentrate on GUI stuff.
However, Mandrake system is not "dumbass distro", it is rather a heavy-duty in disguise. Do not judge on appearance- try it first, comment later.
As for "our" tools, they are all GPL-ed, and at least some of them would work on any other distro (or at least on RH) withouth any changes. Some of them work only on X, other have both X and comandline interfaces. Some of the tools have already evolved into comunity projects already, other have not, but we are very open for any kind of cooperation.
FYI, here is our official policy for the future: All the config-tools should work in both text and graphical mode. Having "http" and "non-interactive" (for scripts) mode would be nice too.
They would be better off if they actually made a pact with some "real" Linux distribution, and built their propriatery stuff on top of it. That way everything stays clean, and they have a solid base system with large userbase to built upon.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that version should really have been called "desktop", because that is what it is good for. No developement tools, no servers. In next edition, we have to do something about it: either change name, or put back the devel+server stuff.
Biased part is: LM version you can buy at WM today is good, in fact it is much better than many other Linux distros out there. Even Roblimo had to admitt that "he had no problems with KDE2".
informative part is: Primary reason why we continued the developement even after shipping the ISO-s for CD-s was the feeling that people will bitch about KDE2-beta, even if there were absolutely no difference between the version we ship and the "final" KDE2.
The "RC1" was idea of our marketing: They were afraid that sales of 7.1 version would be gone as soon as we announce that 7.2 is finished, so we called it Release-candidate. Then, when we rolled out what is called "download edition" today (and which should have been called 7.2.1, I suppose), they got all scared that folks will think that we shipped a beta.
While Marketing drones are marketing drones (and I can tell you one: OUR marketing folks are actaully wery reasonable, and really try hard to somehow put together wishes of users and developers on one and re-salers on other side.), what I don't understand is apparent easines with which Slashdot readers start bashing a Linux distro whenever given a chance to do so.
OK, let me be completely open: For the first time EVER, one Linux distribution puts updated product for download, even before the distro hits the shops. Is there something really badly wrong with the version you can buy in the shop? NO. Beta-testing period for 7.2 has been extremely long, and while 16 more days helped us clean some more bugs, the product you ca n buy in Wal-Mart today is NOT a "beta" or pre-release quality.
FYI, I'm running that version right now, Roblimo has run it succesfully, and although one would not say it from multitude of "beautifful" responses one can read here, most of the people whop tried the distro are very happy with it.
So, one would expect to see a crowd of happy slashdoters celebrating the fact that there actually exists a company which is not afraid of putting a newer version on the net than on CD-s, but instead all I see is "they are trying to frame us", and "LM sux" all over the /.
(Thx, I guess you have just ruined everything i tried to build during last months. I guess, marketing was right: doing ir SuSe-way is much better idea than doing the distro in open way, as we do. As soon as you try to open-up, tell the truth, and count on human inteligence to understand that you REALLY do all you can, all you get is lot of bashing. )
I have been a passionate /. reader for long time, and I must say I am really surprised: what happened with bunch of friendly nerds that once lived here? All gone to greaner pastures, or what?
Main mandrakesoft site isn't open for "normal people", it is "mirrors only" to avoid this kind of problems.
And mirroring started on friday, so they should have had enough time to syncronise until monday.
Of coarse it died. mandrakeforum is just a poor little machine with news for a few hard-core mandrake-fans. It can take several thousends of visitors/day, but not the hoard of slashdoters. One day... .-)
Since I'm already writing this: I want to thank Roblimo for holding back a story until today.
I am rather sure that he got a word on it at friday, because I got it at friday evening
(cute, as if I didn't know already...)
So at sutherday, I decided to give the hard core of mandrake users a chance to download 7.2 before slashdot effect kills all the mirrors, and I'm really happy that /. did not strike imediately.
Thx, Rob!
LM 7.2 will include KDE2-final.
Well, I'm the guy who wrote the article on mandrakeforum, and in case it isn't clear:
I don't care how good/bad is RH: I wouldn't work for Mandrakesoft if I wouldn't think we are doing a better job, but that particular story about counting bugs in bugzilla was below all standards and may have hurt the Linux as a whole, not only RedHat.
As for LM 7.2, it is not "potentially better than SuSe", it is definitively going to be better than whatever SuSe can come up with. ;->
(The rest is just my very private observation, and not in any way Mandrakesoft's official statement: I'm not very fond of SuSe, and newer was. Even some folk at Mandrakesoft may disagree with me, and I am sure many slashdot readers do as well..)
There are two things which always bothered me about SuSe: Yast licence and non-standard way of setting-up the filesystem. Then I learned more about it (well, I lived in Austria...), and found out there were more things that bother me. For instance, it seems that they aren't very eager to let people download the newest version, so they simply don't put it on ftp-servers. Also, they do not seam to care about licances at all, so last time I looked free- and non-free software was all mixed-up.
Ha, I found a Mandrakesoft-user here!.-) Let me see... I just installed the LM 7.2 beta3, and I can choose between KDE2, Gnome, WindowMaker, XFce, IceWM, Sawfish or Fvwm1 on login. And this is just a vanila instalation (i asked for additional WM-s though). Yup, I'm not going to use XFce (WINDOW MAKER FOREVER), but I would kill to make sure you can use it.
Waht a winning combination: We'll get a device with quality of motorolas phones, with Palms pricetag! Sorry, I KNOW this is troll, but I simply can not forget the face of my friend Patricia when she realised that her "exciting", "cute", "wonderfull" (and quite expensive too) new little Motorola phone, and not beeing able to get a connection at places where other phones would work withouth any problems. That was like 1.5 years ago, and I still see the same model (now for free) in the shops...
But ogg vorbis is here, you don't have to wait for it anymore. Support for ogg will be included in Linux Mandrake 7.2, which is currently in beta-testing phase, and I am quite sure other distros will suport it soon if they don't already.
It works very nicely - i have a HD full of ogg-s...
Include a good linux driver on CD shiped with this
thingy, and 99% of the users will not even bother
looking for an alternative.
As simple as that: People do not REALLY care about
freedom of krenel drivers, but they do care about
functionality.
We needed quite a lot of work to get him avare that Mandrake does things somewhat differently... Now he does a similar mistake with debian. Fun. He will gett a lot of JB awards, if he goes on like this...
First I thought that he simply has something against Mandrakesoft, but now... I don't know, maybe he has no time to do a homework on distros he does not use. It is strange, when one knows that he is the author of the "Linux Administrators Security Guide".
(I know I will end up somewhere on the bottom of the line of people crying "outrage", but I can not help it.)
Since I work for an free-software company, I'm not fond of NDA-s at all, but I can kind-of understand the "need" for these bestias. You work for a company, they pay you, and they do not want you to run away and produce their next product for the concurence. Fair enough...
However, signing a NDA withouth getting ANYTHING in return (are interviews considered "precious" nowdays?) is one of the most stupendeous ideas I ever heard about.
Also, considering the amount of stupid PATENTS one sees nowdays, I can imagine what kind of common-knowledge informations could a paranoid company consider "propriatery"... Brr, I do not even want to think about it.
There are some Linux distros which are more KDE-centric (RedHat, TurboLinux), and other which are more GNOME-centric (Mandrake, SuSe, Corel), and later have much higher presence on the desktop. This will not change overnight.
In a month or so, you'll see KDE2 announcement, and lot of folks wil shout "end of GNOME".
It would not surprise me to see a KDE-backing group emerging either...
Ah well, it is kind of fun, so let it be. Besides, even if GNOME does become a "winner" one day, so what? I suppose Qt- (i.e KDE-) based progs will start using the GNOME infrastructure where nessesary, and life will go on.
As for the Qt licence, there is nothing dangerous in it anymore, and I have even heard rumors of new licence which is supposed to be GPL-compatible. We'll see..
So, Gnome gets official Sun and HP blessing. Good, but "so what"?
.-)
Both KDE and GNOME are doing quite nicely (with or withouth HP/SUN), and both have their appeal. HP/Sun backing one or the other will not change much, I think. And there is backing for KDE too: SuSe does it, Mandrakesoft does it, and I'm sure other companies do or will do it in the future too. The only thing which COULD kill a KDE at the moment would be some wide-spread mad-programmers desease among KDE developers: rather unlikely in my opinion.
One is sure: Gnome vs. KDE wars are going in the next round. Some people will prefere GNOME, other will stick with KDE, there will be a cute flamewar to talk about during the cofee break...
Is this bad? No. As I said, we have something to talk about, both Gnome and KDE get a lot of free publicity, and all are happy. And, in the meantime we'll get TWO wonderfull desktops, so that is fine with me.
It is a difficult task: once there is a source code of a package some good programer considers "interesting", the only way to kill that particular software would be to kill all the programers willing to work on it.
Then you would have to hount ALL the copies of the source-code on the earth and burry them in the dirth... And a few months later someone would dig it out again. I do not claim that AFS will re-emerge as a next big thing now, but if there is freely available code, someone will hack on it.
Since there seams to be a base of users ready to actually PAY for maintainance, it is very likely that some programmers may even end-up beeing payed to work on AFS in the future... It does not look so dead to me...
alternatively, you take the next Linux distro that comes along and you have it all... Want to have a shameless plug? OK, than you will have it .-)
All of the Helix Gnome 1.2 has been integrated in Linux-Mandrake "cooker" (i.e. experimental) distro, and will be in shops in a few months. In a meantime, one can use "urpmi" or its X counterpart "RpmDrake" to get all you need installed in one step.
I am quite sure that debian users enjoy about the same level of easines with their "apt-get" and co., so things are far less problematic than you think.
And debian has a particular role: it is a concience of the whole Linux industry. Glad to see them getting this award - keep on with the good work!
Actually, on Linux-Mandrake all you have to do is use "urpmi" for installing packages, and you do not have to think about dependencies anymore. Yes, right - rpm based system have their own versions of "apt-get" too. In case you prefere to click your way around, both "rpmdrake" and "MandrakeUpdate" are urpmi avare. I do not think that installing/upgrading can be much easier then that.
Mandrake has released security update for kernel some time ago. 2.2.15 had some big holes - upgrade to 2.2.16 at once. The same is true for all other distros, for instance RedHat or SuSe
It may be true that lot of free software starts its life chaotically. However, claiming that big, succesful projects are developed chaotically is complete nonsense. The proces of specifying the direction in which free software moves is different from what people working in traditional software developement may be used to. Maybe these new organisatory schemes are difficult for Dr. Spafford to understand, but claiming that developement of "Apache", "Gnome", "KDE"... are chaotic is complete nonsense.
As for the question wether Open-source project can become "thrusted" or not, this depends on only two factors:
If these two are in synch, chances are that Open source project will reach the state where you can trust it much faster than a project coded in traditional way.
Trust me - you are not the only one annoyed by such glitches. We are working on this problem, and quality controle has impoved a lot since I joined the company... Yup, we are (still .-) not perfect, but we are heading in a right direction. cu Denis
Test the bloody distro. Just install the server with ML 7.1, play with it for some time, then we can talk again. Otherwise you will keep telling me that we "concentrate only on X" , and I will start yelling at you. :-(
As for the second point:
- I am not going to test these tools on other distros. However, everything we do is GPL, and if you want to test anything on other distros, or help with coding, or assure that everything we do works on every other distro, you are welcome to join the developers team.
- There are at least two tools for which I know that they are beeing developed together with users/developers of other distributions: our security tool, and harddrake. AFAIK, we have recently contributed quite a lot to Webmin too.
- Unlike some other distros out there, we try sticking to standards. We dream of the world where binaries for one distro will work on all of them.
You do not really expect us to make sure all our tools work flawlesly on other distros, do you? In your world, it seams, developing under GPL licence is not enough, right? We should spend all our time debugging other distros, I suppose...Yup. New kernel is in cooker, and I hope we will finaly announce the upgrade today and make it available as "first official upgrade" for 7.1. Stupid timing :-(
Well, one of the beauties of a Linux is that everyone is free to choose whatever suits him the best. Mandrake (i work for Mandrakesoft now) focuses on "making the system easier to use", and the most visible component is fine-tuning the GUI - that is why press releases usually concentrate on GUI stuff.
However, Mandrake system is not "dumbass distro", it is rather a heavy-duty in disguise. Do not judge on appearance- try it first, comment later.
As for "our" tools, they are all GPL-ed, and at least some of them would work on any other distro (or at least on RH) withouth any changes. Some of them work only on X, other have both X and comandline interfaces. Some of the tools have already evolved into comunity projects already, other have not, but we are very open for any kind of cooperation.
FYI, here is our official policy for the future: All the config-tools should work in both text and graphical mode. Having "http" and "non-interactive" (for scripts) mode would be nice too.
They would be better off if they actually made a pact with some "real" Linux distribution, and built their propriatery stuff on top of it. That way everything stays clean, and they have a solid base system with large userbase to built upon.