Why Mandrake is Too Cool for UnitedLinux 392
An anonymous reader says "Mandrake's lastest community (spam) newsletter contains their explanation as to why they won't join in on UnitedLinux. Besides the obvious geek-fun of rolling their own distro, they claim that the underlying idea of UnitedLinux is based on a flawed comparison to the Unix world of the 80's. " I think the whole UnitedLinux thing is lame- the distros that want
to be compatible already are. UL is just the 2nd tier distros trying to get attention and ink away from the "evil forces" in North Carolina. I'll just
stick to the best distribution and watch
the fun from afar ;)
What? (Score:2, Informative)
Aren't they just a Redhat distro with some a few mods? If Mandrake is more than that, please explain.
Re:UnitedLinux is not the solution (Score:3, Informative)
There's an RPM version of apt-get at freshrpms.net [freshrpms.net]. It's for Redhat but I don't see why it wouldn't work for Mandrake.
I don't think apt-get will solve the problem of different RPMs for different distros.
Re:Why Mandrake is right (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, try it out. It's absolutely wonderful. By far the best way I've found to keep your system from accumulating too much cruft (well, it won't stop the accumulation, but it will make it trivially easy to get rid of later). I've only used Encap, but it's way way cool. When you compile a program, use "--prefix=/usr/local/encap/program-1.0" with the configure script, and then you'll have /usr/local/encap/program-1.0/bin, /usr/local/encap/program-1.0/share, etc . . . Then you run "epkg -i program" and it'll install all the symlinks correctly into /usr/local the way you'd expect. Then you can remove packages, upgrade, etc, etc, etc. Very fun.
Re:Spam (Score:3, Informative)
That being said, Mandrake doesn't seem to spam - I had to explicitly sign up for the newsletter...
Re:UnitedLinux is not the solution (Score:5, Informative)
It's the backend for the graphical software manager. Automatically downloads dependancies etc. similar to apt-get(I said similar, not like apt-get). I like typing partial package names and it will give you a list of all matches, versions, etc. Works fine out of the box but you really need to add mirrors for updates and cooker if you want to really work well.
Urpmi has had some teething problems in the past but works well now on my systems. Anyone working with it on the 8.0 PPC release will know what I'm talking about. The issues basically convinced me to run the development version (cooker) on this iMac until the bugs were worked out. Worked much better when I got the latest wget. Curl didn't really help the issues for me. The last couple releases have worked flawlessly for me. That has me looking for problems that may or may not be there. YMMV
I'm not knocking apt-get. I've used it and thinks it works great. I also like the package management in FreeBSD too. I think more Distos/OSes can look at what's been done and follow these examples.
Re:they dont hack libc libm or anything important (Score:5, Informative)
lets see them actually use gcc3.1 before redhat
Nice flamebait.
They are already using gcc 3.1 in Mandrake Cooker, their development distro.
They built everything with it short after the release of 8.2. They tried before, with Mandrake's rpm-rebuilder robot, but a lot of software didn't build with gcc 3.0 then.
With gcc 3.1 and 3.1.1 things look better.
They were the first with devfs in mdk 8.0 I believe, allthough that might have been a bit early.
They were the second distro to use apt-get (after Connectiva), but they switched to their own tool, urpmi, which is working rather good nowadays (apt-get for rpm isn't perfect yet too, you know).
So all in all, it seems to me you put out a rather cheap flamebait; you mostly lack the right information.
Re:Why Should Success == evil forces? (Score:4, Informative)
This presumption isn't correct IMHO. Not even Richard Stallman (whos rhetoric, while often quite insightful, is about as feiery as it gets) is guilty of what you describe here, much less the majority of the GNU/Linux and Free Software/Open Source community at large.
Red Hat has done some great things for the community, and has given back a great deal to the community. I may not prefer their distro personally, but I have no trouble suggesting it (or Mandrake) to friends who want to install and play around with Linux.
What has RedHat done that is so bad?
They have encouraged proprietary software vendors to release their wares in a manner that is compatible with Red Hat and not other distributions, by falsely implying that they, Red Hat, set the standards and everyone else follows.
This is bad because (a) Red Hat does not (and shouldn't) set the standards and (b) it is quite possible, and vastly preferable, to package software in a distribution-agnostic form installable by evertyone. Blender did it, Loki did it, Id and several other proprietary vendors do it now.
This is my only real criticism of Red Hat, and if they would cease and desist this behavior (which IMHO does in fact do harm to the community as a whole, and to the vendors who are seduced by the erroneous notion they have to target one or two main distros) I would have absolutely nothing bad to say about them whatsoever.
UL, on the other hand, is an effort to exploit exactly this myth, mislead software vendors in the process (to their detriment and the detriment of the GNU/Linux community at large), all without giving even a fraction of what Red Hat has given back to the community, and that is a very real and serious problem. Actually, propogating the notion of commercially imposed standards (rather than standards formed by consensus) and forcing users to use a One True Distro (or forever chase and mimick a One True Distro) is a terrible disservice to the community, regardless of how much is "given back" to the community to compensate, and it is an effort that should be resisted and fought.
Re:UnitedLinux is not the solution (Score:2, Informative)
2) Apt is a front end to the package manager, whatever you come up with will probably be usable with apt with a little tweaking.
Re:Point-by-point rebuttal (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/yourbusiness/sto
http://www.professionaljeweler.com/archives/news/
Re:mandrake (Score:3, Informative)