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Mandriva Businesses The Almighty Buck

MandrakeSoft Roundup 214

Posted by CowboyNeal from the turning-things-around dept.
uninet writes "MandrakeSoft, the French GNU/Linux distributor who filed for bankruptcy protection one year ago last week, announced today that its first fiscal quarter of 2004 resulted in a positive operating result of 280,000. The company also announced Beta 1 of Mandrake Linux 10.0 today." Additionally, tkittel writes that "Mandrake has just announced on their club pages that they will release an updated version of their 9.2 ISO's (but just for club members). This is due to popular request after the numerous updates after the initial release." OSDN's own Robin Miller had a chance to talk with MandrakeSoft's CEO and learn more about the company's future plans.
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MandrakeSoft Roundup More

MandrakeSoft Roundup

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  • How much was operating revenue? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RaboKrabekian ( 461040 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:32PM (#8061481) Journal
    This isn't meant as a flame, I wish Mandrake well.

    But how much of their income last quarter was due to donations, and do they expect to be able to keep that up? I really don't know, and I'd like to hear from soemone in the know.

    • Re:How much was operating revenue? (Score:4, Informative)

      by starm_ ( 573321 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:35PM (#8061504)
      They have a really great product. Probably the easyest to use Linux distro. Red Hat was succesfull, why couldn't they?
    • well if the income was from donations, all they need to do is to rename themselves as a non profit orginization and rely entirely on dontations to fund their good works.
    • There aren't donations and it's October to December 2003 results. Not January to March results.
    • People donate to AOL all the time even though AIM is free, Winamp is free, Mozilla is free. Whats your point? Their model is based on subscription revenue not donations. I see nothing wrong with this model if they make money. If Howard Dean can make millions of dollars just by hosting a blog, I don't see why an important Linux company cant stay afloat in non profit fashion.

    • Re:How much was operating revenue? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Compuser ( 14899 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:12PM (#8061787)
      Club membership is a more permanent version of
      shareware concept, where you pay dues to keep
      getting support. It makes sense. When I was using
      Mandrake for a brief time, I considered becoming a
      club member but their page asks for personal info
      so I went away and soon switched distros for this
      and other reasons.

      • Re:How much was operating revenue? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by 13Echo ( 209846 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @10:07PM (#8062576) Homepage Journal
        I gave them $70 when the club first started, even though I was using Slackware. Why? I used several versions of Mandrake when I was begining to "get my feet wet" with Linux. Mandrake was pretty simple to use, though it didn't really hook me like Slackware did. Never-the-less, I felt that I owed them a bit of a contribution for what they gave me... It was the least I could do.

      • Re:How much was operating revenue? (Score:4, Informative)

        by mairas ( 102089 ) <mairas@iki.fi> on Friday January 23, 2004 @03:19AM (#8064100) Homepage

        [...] but their page asks for personal info so I went away and soon switched distros for this and other reasons.

        As MandrakeSoft is a European company, I don't think their request for personal information is really a good reason for not choosing them. European privacy legislature is actually quite strict and pro-consumer, and any entity collecting personal information must have a clear and valid reason for doing so. The information also cannot be sold to 3rd parties without the customer's consent, nor can it be sold/transferred to countries with insufficient privacy legislature (e.g. USA). There might be other reasons for not choosing Mandrake, but I don't think privacy concern is one of them.

    • Re:How much was operating revenue? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Eggplant62 ( 120514 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:18PM (#8061834)
      how much of their income last quarter was due to donations, and do they expect to be able to keep that up? I really don't know, and I'd like to hear from soemone in the know.


      MandrakeClub is a worthwhile service in my own personal opinion, one which I'm glad to purchase. I had paid my subscription 2 years in advance, so I'm just surfing along. I continue to buy the distribution in the powerpack cd version, 7 cd's loaded with stuff. Yes there have been quality control issues but my own equipment wasn't affected. I was embarrassed, though, when I had to replace a friend's CDROM drive when the install of 9.2 went sour.

      I've got stock in the company and I love the distribution. It's easy to use, comes very well customized to my own needs, and is easily tweaked up with everything that I need, whether I'm running it on my serversl or laptops or whatever. I'm proud to say that I support Mandrake.

    • Re:How much was operating revenue? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by vsprintf ( 579676 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:33PM (#8062388)

      But how much of their income last quarter was due to donations, and do they expect to be able to keep that up? I really don't know, and I'd like to hear from soemone in the know.

      Well, I don't know what you consider "donations", but as a Mandrake Club member, I will continue to recompense them 60 dollars per year in support of an excellent, easy to install, OS as opposed to the exorbitant fees charged by MS for their, er, product.

      • Well, I don't know what you consider "donations", but as a Mandrake Club member, I will continue to recompense them 60 dollars per year in support of an excellent, easy to install, OS as opposed to the exorbitant fees charged by MS for their, er, product.

        Let's see $60 per year is $180 over three years. I typically change OS'es around every three years. Currently retail for Windows XP is $299 (full edition), although I'm sure you could get it cheaper if you tried. That's only $40 per year more than you p

        • $99 on average for the OEM edition of Windows XP.

          It's why I always tended to think of Mandrake as expensive. Though I would contribute $20-$30, minimum donations of $70 or more suck, moreover such donations on a yearly basis. If they're really in dire straits, they'd take whatever they're given.

          • It's why I always tended to think of Mandrake as expensive. Though I would contribute $20-$30, minimum donations of $70 or more suck, moreover such donations on a yearly basis. If they're really in dire straits, they'd take whatever they're given.

            You always thought Mandrake was expensive? It's free if you download it. If you want to make a "donation" to Mandrake, I'm sure they would accept whatever amount you want to send. The Mandrake Club membership is not required and is not a donation. Membership

        • Unfair comparison... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by robinjo ( 15698 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @12:18AM (#8063241)

          You need to have a Windows license for every computer.

          You can install Mandrake Linux on as many computers you need without being a MandrakeClub member. Only one membership is needed if you feel like joining.

        • Let's see $60 per year is $180 over three years. I typically change OS'es around every three years. Currently retail for Windows XP is $299 (full edition), although I'm sure you could get it cheaper if you tried. That's only $40 per year more than you pay for Mandrake - hardly exorbitant.

          Apples to oranges. For $60/year with Mandrake you get tho OS, the world's dominant webserver with no concurrent connection limits, multiple RDBMSes, multiple WYSIWYG "office suites", ftp server, ntp server, DNS server, D

  • Mandrake Linux 10.0 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ElliotLee ( 713376 )
    Boring version numbering. Apple decided to go X... what's up with that? There's Mac OS 9, then Mac OS X 10.0. Latest is Mac OS X 10.3 - using both X and 10 seems repetitive. RedHat went from 9 to changing their name to Fedora Core 1, effectively starting over. It seems to sound better with version numbers 10 (or 1-digit).
    • How can this get flagged as redundant before I'm even reading any similar posts? WTF?

      I can't tell what to do with version numbers. Call me a heretic but for major releases I like the year release (95, etc) but the problem there is dealing with point releases. I think the fact that they're already 10.0 implies that they release major versions WAY too often.

      And although 10 is arbitrary, that does seem like the perfect release for something major like 2.6 and a newer version of KDE. I'm looking forward to se

  • Good News (Score:5, Informative)

    by MountainMan101 ( 714389 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:37PM (#8061518)
    I think Mandrake is a good way to get a lot of people using Linux. It's polished GUI is good for proving what Linux can be when you don't need command line control. Glad to see they're still going.

    What with RedHat Standard moving to Fedora and Mandrake looking shaky, things were looking bad. Fedora has turned out to be quite good and Madrake are surviving. Just SCO to go bankrupt and the world will be right again.
    • I thnk mandrake could be OK if you use it out the box, but I had some probs with it when I wanted to add to it. I tried to add the Lego USB tower support, but building for Mandrake was not easy. The installation I had did not have kernel dev tools etc installed, so I could not build the Lego USB tower driver. Eventually I said phukkit and installed RH.

      This makes me wonder whether it makes any sense for Joe Sixpack to use Linux. Kernel hackers yes, controlled corporate/school/other organisation desktops yes,

      • I had troubles with Mandrake as well. The first install of 9.2 found my modem and worked fairly well
        It would not open a terminal in a user account though.
        Then a few weeks passed and I thought I would try it again. This time it refused to use my modem. All the other problems seemed to be resolved though.All I have heard was how easy Mandrake was to use the distro for newbies that still had power. Man I still dont know how people got that impression unless the version 8x releases where better.
        Oh well I am sti

  • Why now? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by adrianbaugh ( 696007 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:37PM (#8061521) Homepage Journal
    This seems like a sucky time to bring out 10.0.

    Mandrake has generally placed more emphasis on KDE than other distros, so why would it bring out a distribution either before or only just after the release of KDE 3.2? It would make more sense to wait a month and pick up some bugfixes.
    Kernel 2.6 has only just come out, also. Again, in a month or so we should have quite a bit more stability in that department. I don't know whether or not Mandrake are planning for 10.0 to be 2.6-based but it would seem appropriate for a new major version.

    I realise that there's no "perfect time" to release a distribution and that it has to ship at some time, but given that 9.2 wasn't exactly the most rock-solid distribution around it would (in my view) make a lot more sense to issue their 9.2+bugfixes release as 9.3, or 9-stable or something, and wait for the new kernel and the new KDE to settle down enough that they can form the basis of a modern distribution worthy of a major version increment.

    But that way, of course, they wouldn't be able to sell yet another copy of all those ISOs.

    • Re:Why now? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by dot-magnon ( 730521 )
      10.0 beta is often, in Mandrake sense, half a year from release. And don't say that they're only KDE. They're GNOME focused as well, and all their configuration apps are written using Gtk.

      As you mentioned, 10.0 will be 2.6-based. I'm using 2.6 with Mandrake Cooker (devel) now, and it works good.

      I do agree on your point with 9.2. It wasn't very solid. Even bugs in the installer annoyed me.

      Hm, selling an ISO? Sounds hard.
      • I didn't say Mandrake was only KDE at all! Gnome works just fine on it: it just seems that they're a lot more KDE-orientated than some other distributions - it gets at least equal status and (if I remember correctly from my Mandrake days) if you don't make any desktop preference at all it's the default.
        • First off orientated isn't a word, use oriented. Secondly Mandrake doesn't hide the fact that they've always been KDE-centric, neither does SuSE. To be fair they include the latest gnome with the latest broken window manager to go along with it. They also include a handful of other nice WM's like fluxbox, windowmaker, icewm and enlightenment.

          Basically they provide the most well balanced, easy to use desktop by default and you can choose another one if you like.

    • Re:Why now? (Score:5, Informative)

      by metalhed77 ( 250273 ) <andrewvc&gmail,com> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:52PM (#8061652) Homepage
      http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/100beta.php3

      according tot hat they ARE using kde 3.2 . Mandrake won't release an terribly unstable OS, don't worry. Its only beta one, it'll have plenty of time for bug fixing. May I remind you that KDE 3.2 is only a point release. It probably won't have all that many bugs.
      • Hm. Granted it's not as big a change as from KDE2 to KDE3 but it is still pretty significant: according to the forums there have been several new crash-severity bugs introduced. I don't doubt that most of them will be worked out by the final release, but it's a much bigger jump than from 3.1.4 to 3.1.5.

    • Re:Why now? (Score:5, Informative)

      by nocomment ( 239368 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:08PM (#8061762) Homepage Journal
      This seems like a sucky time to bring out 10.0.

      Nah. Mandrake typically has a loong testing cycle. They Don't *usually* suffer from the "don't buy point-oh releases" that Red Hat has tended to suffer from. They will probably release beta 2 next month and maybe beta 3 shortly thereafter. Then they will move from beta, into release canidates where they typically will go to rc3 or rc4 over the span of 2-3 months. Mandrake is a ways off from actually releasing 10.

      • Re:Why now? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by salimma ( 115327 ) *

        They Don't *usually* suffer from the "don't buy point-oh releases" that Red Hat has tended to suffer from.

        Historically Red Hat made major changes that break binary compatibility at point-oh releases. That was fine with most users as it allows for major changes to be made (RH was first with glibc, NPTL, exec-shield).

        Mandrake releases tend to be of similar stability regardless of their minor numbers. Anyway, now that RHL has morphed into Fedora, with no concept of point-oh releases, the issue is moot.

      • Actually Mandrake is famous for rushing beta cycles. I used to beta test and the amount of negative feedback about how their releases still weren't "finished" was overwhelming with each and every release. They are also well known for shipping bleeding edge not finished products. So what they may call for example kde 3.2 might end up being a kde 3.2pre something. Same goes especially for kernels they ship. Look at Mandrake 9.2. Every Mandrake user I know says that was a completely botched release. Why are t

    • Re:Why now? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Eggplant62 ( 120514 )

      ... in a month or so we should have quite a bit more stability in that department. I don't know whether or not Mandrake are planning for 10.0 to be 2.6-based but it would seem appropriate for a new major version.

      Trust me, 10.0 will be at least six weeks in coming. This is simply the first beta release. People will load them on development servers (only a fool would use a beta distro on a production machine), report the bugs and the programmers will get the fixes in. Several iterations (beta2, maybe b

    • I just loaded the 2003-12-31 cooker on a new machine, and now 10.0 beta comes out :-) Does anybody know what the differences are? Should I let Bittorrent run for the next 126 hours to get a copy and install that instead? I haven't actually had time to see what was in cooker yet :-)
      • Probably naff all difference. Given cooker is their perpetual development branch I suspect they just release a snapshot of cooker as beta. If you keep updating your cooker distro you should find yourself keeping track of the development.


    • This seems like a sucky time to bring out 10.0.

      If Mandrake is going to ever catch up with the other super-stable, super-user-friendly, super-unix-based OS, it's going to need to get into the 10s with its product numbering.

  • Be careful (Score:4, Interesting)

    by apoupc ( 569200 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:39PM (#8061546)
    I ordered Mandrake 9.2 when it came out and cancelled the order 2 weeks later when they didn't deliver it. After 2 months of numerous emails back and forth of emails of "Refund process can take up to ten business days. We have recontacted our financial department about your order." I still have not received a refund.
    • I have ordered the 9.0 DVD-only and 9.1 and 9.2 DVD+CDs-only packs from the store, and all 3 orders arrived within the quoted shipping time (which at 10 days is faster than Amazon for the same shipping cost), and this to South Africa ...
    • This is true; you're not the first person to have problem with their ordering-system. They have even on admitted as much, and are claimingto be working on the problem.

      Still, my recommendation is simply to get Mandrake-cds from somewhere else, and insteaed support Mandrakesoft financially by becoming a club-member if you wish. There's plenty of places selling mandrake-cds for a couple of bucks. The Mandrakesoft-shop, sadly, sucks.

    • I've never had a problem ordering CD's from Mandrake but when I bought my Club Membership they took the money and loast all trace of my order.

      However it only took 2 e-mails from me for them to sort it out, they said

      "Sorry, we don't have a clue what happened with your order but here are your membership details, welcome to the Club"

      So I think 0 marks for their ordering system but full marks for their customer service and helpfulness.
    • I had a very prompt delivery, but it was strange. I got the 9.2 DVD like TWO DAYS after submitting the order, although I didn't specify any fast delivery. The package had been sent from some wacky-named small company a few miles away from me. When I first saw the parcel I was sure it was some goofy sales pitch from new-age transendantal hippy organization. (I forgot the company's name on the return address, but it was really spacey.)

      A week after I got my package the Mandrake ordering system notified me tha

  • Mandrake really is one of the best. (Score:5, Informative)

    by stealth.c ( 724419 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:40PM (#8061551)
    My favorite distro yet has probably been Mandrake 9.1. It was the easiest to compile DVD playing for, ran my Windows games well with WineX, and didn't jack around with my sound like most other distros (I have some rare BA speakers notorious for Linux incompatibilities. Only Drake9.1/SUSE/Lycoris seem to recognize them). At the moment I'm running the barely tolerable Win98 because frankly, that's the only way I can play Homeworld or Halo. ;)

  • It's good to hear (Score:4, Informative)

    by MysteriousMystery ( 708469 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:41PM (#8061569)
    It's good to hear Mandrake is doing well, it's been my preffered distribution since version 7.0 or so. A lot of people are still under the impression that Mandrake is just a Red Hat clone with KDE as the default WM but the distribution has come a long way since then. It has a nice installer and a lot of nice tools, good hardware detection and unlike most desktop oriented distro's, it isn't crippled in any way.

  • "280,000"... what? bananas? (Score:5, Informative)

    by joestar ( 225875 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:42PM (#8061576) Homepage
    ... 280,000 Euro, which is around $358,000.

    Additionally, there are two important facts in their financial results: 1) revenue has increased of +8.4% compared to the same quarter for year 2002/03 2) the gross margin increased of +28.9% during the same time. More importantly: their gross margin has reached 82% of revenue. This is excellent and shows that their business model has improved much and potentially makes MandrakeSoft a very profitable company.

    Nice shot for a pure Open Source [mandrakelinux.com] company.
    • With distro's like Xandros [xandros.com] getting rave [slashdot.org] reviews and Lindows [lindows.com] pushing further integration and Suse getting EAL3 [slashdot.org] certified things are now starting to get interesting.

      I am a huge Mandrake fan, but they seem to be falling behind in total integration and after using them since 7.2 for the first time I've been considering making a switch [xandros.com].

      Their basic distro has not been really evolving and although it started out more evolved then its counterparts, this is starting to change. Most of the updates since 7.2 have

  • Looks impressive... Needs some evangelism... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sisukapalli1 ( 471175 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:47PM (#8061611)
    Things are really boding well for the linux desktop. I believe one main obstacle is for people to just know about what all can be done with a standard linux distro since there are so many nifty applications (my experience was with KDE and all little utils such as kdirstat).

    Here is one example related to the need for evangelism: I have used latex very much, but only now, after killing some time on the net looking at related stuff, did I find information about "texdoc", a sort of a "browser for tex/latex". When I tried to look at texdoc, I found the shell showing texdoc and texdoctk, texdoctk has a GUI and a sort of a comprehensive reference. If it took me so much time to come across such a useful tidbit, imagine how much time it would take for someone that does not even have much interest in exploring. He/she would be stuck with cryptic menus [hcooh.ch]

    BTW, Mandrake's 10.0 beta looks impressive (KDE 3.2Pre Linux 2.6.1 (+2.4.25)), and the bittorrent link is at here [mandrakesoft.com]

    S

  • well... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:50PM (#8061639)
    if you guys read the second link to newsforge you would see there is a community and official version. My guess is that the community version is going to be for bleeding edge while in 3 months the official one is more stable, but then again thats my guess. My hopes is that both versions are free. Also Mandrake is not like lindows. Mandrake can be used both for command line and non commandline things. Makes a good replacement to Red Hat 9 in my opinion

    • Re:well... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Slime-dogg ( 120473 )

      The cooker versions are for the bleeding edge. The community version is their free three cd release that includes the base system, and some standard free stuff. The commercial version usually comes with more toys, some free, some proprietary.

  • Mandrake 10 beta torrent links (Score:5, Informative)

    by Internet Ninja ( 20767 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:53PM (#8061664) Homepage
    Get in from here [mandrakesoft.com].

    There's more information on the beta in the Mandrake Linux Wiki [mandrakesoft.com]

  • There can only be One (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Quirk ( 36086 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:56PM (#8061684) Homepage Journal
    "SUSE to start using Gnome as its primary desktop now that Novell, which had already bought Ximian, has acquired the company."

    SUSE and Mandrake are fighting for the same market. If it comes down to the survival of one I don't see that Mandrake's resources can match those of SUSE.

    • Mandrake = Mindshare.. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by msimm ( 580077 )
      I agree that things are heating up. Novell is in a very interesting position. Mandrake still has a couple of advantages, mainly they have probably got one of the most active (for a commercial distro) communities surrounding them. Package resources like THAC and PLF keep a steady stream of great easy to install (newbie friendly) software available (like the whole MythTV package WITH all dependencies). Their entire approach to business will keep some users very dedicated (all MandrakeSoft created software is
    • I think SUSE's main market is the server market. They've got a greata desktop, but if this year's Linuxworld is any indication of where the collective SUSE/Novell connection wants to position themselves, it's in the server market. They're heavily pushing Enterprise Server, not Professional. Add to that OpenExchange. Linuxworld in general this year really is about the desktop, but I haven't seen it from SUSE. Maybe once they get Ximian more integrated into the company, yes, but right now it's all about
    • Mandrake has one very important resource that SuSE no longer has: it's a wholly European company. And no, in a better world that wouldn't matter -- but in a world where European markets are justifiably nervous about the implications of US control of their critical software, it matters a great deal.
    • I'm a perennial SuSE user. I originally chose SuSE for its use of the KDE desktop, because it was similar to all the CDE UNIX boxen where I worked. However, if Novell starts to muck about with SuSE then I will beat a hasty path to Mandrake's door instead. And all Mandrake has to do to have me as a customer is to just keep up their support for KDE while SuSE goes the way of the Gnome.

      It's not that I don't like Gnome, I just want to stay with KDE.
    • SUSE and Mandrake are fighting for the same market. If it comes down to the survival of one I don't see that Mandrake's resources can match those of SUSE.

      National division. Suse is German. Mandrake is French. Mandrake is sold in major bookshops in France (e.g. Gibert in Paris, Sauramps in Montpellier...), Suse is not. Now that Mandrake decided to go full steam towards French market domination, there's nothing to stop them. This will provide them with a large user base, from which they can spread their inf

  • Kernel Sources. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Forge ( 2456 ) <kevinforge.gmail@com> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:58PM (#8061693) Homepage Journal
    Are they puting back the Kernel source? It wasn't on the ISOs I downloaded for 9.2

    I had to go back for that RPM when I needed to use it (and thus discoverd it's absence).

    Sure the 3 ISOs were a virtualy maximum size anyway but you can prioritise. I.e. Mandrak's target audience (Desktop users) are more likely to need the Kernel Source (WinModem setup forinstance) than Emacs.

    PS: Good of them to put the end user text editors in the instalation. Joe, and Jed come to mind.

    • Are they puting back the Kernel source? It wasn't on the ISOs I downloaded for 9.2

      Really? I'm pretty sure it was... it's just that mdk has left kernel-source out of the default install for a while, maybe since 9.0. So you'd have to use rpmdrake or urpmi to install it yourself. Right now, I see a listing for it in my 9.2 distrib mirror (that I use in lieu of having to put in the actual cds).

      I'm not sure why they leave it out -- I imagine I'm not the only person who always ends up installing it anyway.

    • PS: Good of them to put the end user text editors in the instalation. Joe, and Jed come to mind. I'd vote nano. Debian did and I love it (basically pico, if it had a better name it would almost be perfect).

  • PCLinuxOS - Mandrake done right (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:59PM (#8061705)
    PCLinuxOS [pclinuxonline.com] is a live CD distro created by Texstar based on Mandrake 9.2. He's just released beta 5 [pclinuxonline.com].

    As far as Live CDs go, Knoppix [http] is still superior for the development tools, and setting up persistant storage that plays well with FAT32. But this last release is starting to close that gap. And it looks stunning.

    I use Mandrake 9.2, but PCLOS is so much better... My wife likes to watch Starting Over [startingovertv.com], but she can't see any of the previews on the website because they are in Quicktime. Naturally, there's no QuickTime for Linux plugin available. With PCLOS, it just works.

    I've managed to muck something up on my Mandrake desktop, because I have to wait an additional minute after the desktop is installed while it's doing something - I can't figure what, probably trying to get the soundcard to work - and reinstalling Mandrake hasn't taken care of it. CUPS doesn't want to talk to my laser printer, but it works just fine under lpr... It's a complete mess.

    I'm not quite ready to dump Mandrake (PCLOS is still beta), but some of Texstar's RPMs will be installed on my machine Real Soon Now.

    • Things just working is always good...but I'm usualy far more insterested in how easy it is to make the things that dont work, work.

      It's all very well having a distribution that can do a,b and c out of the box, but if when X,Y and Z become the important things later down the track, it's nearly impossible to get them working then it's not much good to me.
      But if a distribution doesn't supply a,b and c functionality out of the box, but doesn't make it difficult to add things, then you can get the a,b and c, an

    • Re:PCLinuxOS - Mandrake done right (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JM ( 18663 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:19PM (#8062310) Homepage
      Do you know how they do it, both technically and legally?

      Quicktime can run under wine, but not all versions, and it's not that stable.

      On the legal side, you can't redistribute Quicktime on a download side, you can only put it on CD, if you agree to put the Windows executable in untouched binary form, and have a distribution agreement.

      Even with Mplayer, you can't view most Quicktime videos without the win32 codecs, and they can't be splitted legally from the windows executable.

      Maybe they have found another way. If true, I'd like to know, otherwise, I'd have some concerns over the legality of their distro...
    • QuickTime actually works pretty fine in a Linux browser, given the right tool. In this case, Kaffeine [sourceforge.net]. Small Xine-based video player, fast and lightweight, simple interface but LOADS of features (DVD playback, with menus of course, post-processing video filters, stream saving...). It managed to impress me, and that's no small feat. It integrates completely seamlessly in Konqueror, so you can watch those embedded QuickTimes without a problem. It also ships with a plug-in for Netscape-related browsers, althou
      • Xine can play Quicktime, but if you need support for the new trailers, you need the Qdesign sound codec, and that requires the win32 quicktime codecs.

        But thanks for the link, I'll try that, since it looks very nice. There's a Mandrake RPM for it in the contribs.
    • 1)pclinuxos is Mandrake 9.2 + updates + some PLF packages, + some updates from contrib + some custom packages by Texstar, generated using mklivecd [berlios.de], which is in Mandrake 9.2 contribs (and easy enough to use that there are already about 5 other Mandrake 9.2-based live CDs made with it).

      2)Quicktime playback is only possible with the win32 codec, which:
      -is not open source (thus can not go in the Mandrake download version which must only consist of open-source software)
      -probably not commercially distributeable

  • Change That Name (Score:5, Funny)

    by ballpoint ( 192660 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:32PM (#8061956)
    I said it before, and I say it again:

    No way I'm going to enter bills for Mandrake Club Services from a French company into my books.

    I do not want to explain to the accountant and the taxman that Mandrake Club is not a parisian brothel.

    For gods sake, choose a professional, if boring, name.

  • Did they ever properly fix the LG CDROM problem? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hazee ( 728152 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:41PM (#8062037)
    The biggest problem I currently have with Mandrake is that I don't dare install it. I have a laptop with an LG CDROM drive, hence one that is potentially susceptible to the drive-killing issue that emerged with Mandrake 9.2

    Mandrake do have a list of tested drives on their site, but mine (CRN-8241B) isn't there, and the closest match, the CRD-8241B, is listed as "unknown status". It seems like a few drives have been tested, some passed, some failed, and then the whole issue quietly swept under the rug.

    LG tech support in the UK were totally unhelpful, first giving me the standard crap about how their drives weren't "designed for Linux" and then, when I educated them about the problem being due not to any particular OS, but to the drives' firmware, they said they'd "get back to me". I'm still waiting. They released some patches on their website, but nothing for my drive.

    Meanwhile, the kernel was supposed to be updated so that it didn't send out the potentially damaging flush commands. But did this happen? I didn't hear about it anywhere prominent. Certainly not on Mandrake's site. I don't even know if the delayed public release of the Mandrake 9.2 ISOs had this fix. If so, why bother with the list of drives - if the kernel's been amended, then the issue ceases to be for all LG drives, right?

    So now I'm in the situation where I don't dare install Mandrake 9.2, or any subsequent version, or even any other recent variant of Linux, for fear that it will destroy my CDROM drive. New features are all very well, but I value my hardware.

    If Mandrake wants me to not stick with 9.1 forever, then they need to display a prominent notice on their website stating that CDROM-killing problem has been fixed.

    • Re:Did they ever properly fix the LG CDROM problem (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Qamelian ( 714680 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:13PM (#8062268)
      Mandrake and LG both worked toward fixing the problem. The info is on the Mandrake website in the errata section. http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/lgerrata.php3 Not only did Mandrake produce a fix, but LG released upgraded firmware for many drives and provided a procedure for resusitating the "dead" drives.
      • No, that's my point - there isn't a full fix on the Mandrake site. What there is, is a small list of tested drives, but by no means all LG drives. (And even some of those present are listed as "unknown status".)

        Equally, LG released upgraded firmware for some, but not all drives.

        And the procedure for resurrecting dead drives is only applicable to desktop drives - it relies on fiddling with jumpers, something that's not practical (or even possible?) with a notebook.

        In short, if your drive isn't on th

    • It's fixed (Score:2, Informative)

      by Quattro Vezina ( 714892 )
      According to Mandrake's website, LG released firmware updates [mandrakelinux.com] to their drives back in November. So you should be safe if you download those.
  • I have been an avid Mandrake supporter for years, but the following quote from Roblimo's article has me concerned:

    "The "community" version is expected to be the first major Linux distribution that includes the 2.6 kernel. Two or three months later, the "official" version will also incorporate the new kernel.

    Bancilhon expects to see updated versions of the "community version" every six months, while the "official" version will be on an 18 month release cycle."

    Basically, I take this to be that they w

    • Not the same as Fedora (Score:5, Informative)

      by tehanu ( 682528 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @10:48PM (#8062800)
      The article says that a big difference between the "community" release and Fedora is that whilst Fedora is entirely separate from Red Hat, Red Hat makes no promises etc., the Mandrake "community" release will still be done under the Mandrake banner, by Mandrake employees and the article says *supported* by Mandrake employees as part of their jobs. I presume that support will be the same as what the current download version gets. I get the impression that the community release is just a new name for the current download version. It is still an 'official' Mandrake product (unlike Fedora). Mandrake releases every 6 months now anyway.

      ". The "community" version of Mandrake will still be produced by company developers and supported by MandrakeSoft employees as part of their job, unlike the Fedora project which is produced outside of Red Hat's formal development structure and supported by volunteers."

      It seems more like they are adding a new product called the "official" version which will have a longer release cycle.

      An essential difference between Mandrake and Redhat is that whilst Redhat is abandoning the (home) desktop (which is part of the reason for the move to spin off the free version as an unsupported volunteer product), the home desktop is probably one of Mandrake's biggest areas.

    • Support periods... (Score:3, Informative)

      by jusdisgi ( 617863 )

      tehanu is correct; "support period" != "release schedule"

      In fact, there was a slashdot story [slashdot.org] about a month ago detailing Mandrakesoft's support policy [mandrakesoft.com], which is lots longer than the release schedule.

  • Have you seen this? (Score:4, Informative)

    by SubtleNuance ( 184325 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:40PM (#8062424) Journal
    Mandrake is selling a bootable-CDROM based distro called Mandrake Move [mandrakesoft.com]. Your ~/ is stored on a USB Flash drive -- so, you boot the CD w/ the Flash installed and whatever PC your on is your own.... the way you 'left-it'.

    Very cool idea. Now, if they could get the whole distro onto one of those card-sized cdroms we'd be set.

  • Mandrake 10.0 beta bittorrent (Score:4, Informative)

    by Elusive_Cure ( 645428 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @10:21PM (#8062666)
    http://66.90.75.92/torrents/1005/MandrakeLinux-10. 0-beta1.torrent Enjoy

  • Why Mandrake? (Score:3, Informative)

    by stock ( 129999 ) <stock@stokkie.net> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @11:28PM (#8062984) Homepage
    Simple, its the best SRPM eater and fastest RPM producer around. Just look e.g. on www.rpmfind.net and search for that favorate package. Mandrake and/or Mandrake Cooker editions always show up.

    They have a development engine which rockz :

    Thread model: posix
    gcc version 3.3.1 (Mandrake Linux 9.2 3.3.1-2mdk)

    Basicly IMHO Mandrake 9.2 is just latest redhat _without_ corporate intervenance...

    I tried Mandrake 9.2RC1 AMD64 on a ASUS K8V board with that AMD Athlon AMD64 3200+ CPU , which is running 2200MHz/1024kb cache. And also their x86_64 development platform rockz. All i386 based SRPMS it just compiled with warp-12 speed into *.x86_64.rpm's.

    read e.g. :
    [mandrakeclub.com]
    http://www.mandrakeclub.com/modules.php?op=modlo ad &name=Splatt_Forum&file=viewtopic&topic=16806&foru m=9

    Robert
  • France: 'Allo! 'Oo is it?

    Darl: It is I, CEO Darl, and these are my knights of the Board of Directors. Whose castle is this?

    France: This is the castle of my master, Guy de Mandrake.

    Darl: Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us money for infringing code, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Linux License.

    France: Well, I'll ask 'im, but I don't think 'e'll be very keen-- 'e's already got one, you see?

    Darl: What?

    Sontag: He says they've already *

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