Mandriva Not Shuttering Its Doors, Yet 97
An anonymous reader writes, quoting OS News: "In his usual man-of-a-few-words manner today, Jean-Manuel Croset, Mandriva COO, announced that enough funds have been secured to allow Mandriva to keep its doors open and continue development."
From the announcement: "The strategy review started two weeks ago will now actively be finalized and the corresponding decisions taken mid of May."
Fork'ed off! (Score:4, Informative)
While it's good to read that Mandriva has continued, I forked off to Mageia which is currently on version 2 beta3 testing, seems to perform better than version 1, but the only down side is some packages that are in Mandriva are still not in Mageia. But for most people - that is the normal home user, it should be fine if they decide to install Mageia.
Don't forget, it was the workforce that Mandriva fired in the first place that led to the Mageia fork, and a drain on programming talent that Mandriva needed.
Re:What is Mandriva? (Score:5, Informative)
1) Its got a control center. Find me an OS without one?
I haven't seen a single other Linux distro with a control center. At least not one of the scale and functionality of Mandriva's. My current distro (Arch) doesn't have one at all. Unless you count the KDE panel, which is pretty much useless by comparison. Can't set up printers (well, it claims you can, but it never works), you can't set up wifi, you can't set up system services, you can't even adjust the display to the same extent that you can in the Mandriva control center. Maybe they need to emphasize what it is a bit more -- because I've tried a dozen or so distros and never seen anything remotely close.
4) RPM based. OK so its repackaged redhat.
There's also URPMI, the easiest package manager I've yet seen. Easier than pacman/yaourt, easier than apt-get.
It's a distro for newbies. The best one out there. Best hardware autodetection and autoconfig I have ever seen in a Linux distro. Back a couple years ago when getting a broadcom wifi package to work on Ubuntu required downloading ndiswrapper, installing it from source, and configuring all that in the terminal -- the same hardware worked on Mandriva right out of the box. I had a friend recently with some weird graphics card glitch that meant Arch, Ubuntu, Gentoo -- nothing she tried could start X, and googling the error messages came up with forum posts that essentially said 'it's a bug in this hardware version -- good luck, you're on your own.' Mandriva? Worked flawlessly.
Maybe they're advertising it wrong. They should probably be focusing on things like this. But personally, I've been using Linux for around eight years now, and from day one the distro I recommend for newbies is Mandriva (well, on day one it was Mandrake....) I still haven't found another distro -- hell, I haven't found any other OS -- that's as easy as Mandriva to get started with.
Re:What's the point? (Score:4, Informative)
ScientificLinux is the new CentOS. Faster updates, and automatically applied security updates by default. A couple of times, I have received the e-mail from my SL servers about security updates having been applied before the e-mail from RedHat announcing the same security update for my RHEL systems.
Backed by CERN, Fermilab and others, SL is unlikely to go away any time soon.
Re:Fork'ed off! (Score:4, Informative)
That's nothing at all like what happened with Mandriva. Mageia wasn't forked off just as Mandriva looked like it was going to make mainstream success, it forked off because the future of the company was in jeopardy.
Re:What is Mandriva? (Score:4, Informative)
4) RPM based. OK so its repackaged redhat.
No, RPM-based doesn't mean it's repackaging Redhat, you're confusing it with Centos and Scientific Linux. Mandriva is actually one of a small number of distros that does a unique packaging effort - ie. the developers package most things themselves rather than basing it off another distro such as Ubuntu does with Debian.
In the past, i.e. early 2000's, Mandrake/Mandriva had some of the nicer desktop-focused features such as:
- automatic resizing of the Windows partition in the installer-
- GUI partitioning program available not just in the installer but in the Control Centre after installation
- decent package manager with dependency resolution and large repos (almost on a par with Debian's)
- decent default settings for KDE and GNOME
- working USB and CD/DVD automounting (the Mandrake/driva developers went to great pains to get this working long before HAL and udev came and made it a comodity feature)
But that was the past and all major distro's have those things now. So you're probably right, currently there's no standout feature that Mandriva has over other distros, probably just personal preference for those that use it.