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Mandrake 2006 Will Integrate Conectiva Components 142

Linzer writes "Mandrakelinux just issued this press release presenting (1) a new one-year release cycle, with a year-based naming scheme and (2) their updated development roadmap. In a nutshell: the upcoming 10.2 becomes a transitional release, labeled 'Limited Edition 2005.' Next fall will see Mandrakelinux 2006, merging Mdk and Conectiva know-how (and possibly some know-not?) For the amnesic: Mandrakesoft and Conectiva recently merged." Not everyone is pleased, though: Tingulli 3 writes "As a member of the Italian Mandrakelinux translation team , I spent nights translating some packages to be on schedule for the 10.2 release. I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2 release, without anybody announcing it to the community."
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Mandrake 2006 Will Integrate Conectiva Components

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  • by onlyjoking ( 536550 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @07:11PM (#12006244)
    Around 10.0 Mandrake's networking went down the pan. Cards which worked with 9 suddenly didn't work and lost their settings. At other times the same cards couldn't be detected. Mandrake's Control Centre's display config tool was also terrible. I switched to Fedora and never looked back. One thing Fedora has over Mandrake is the option to install everything. This makes installation a breeze as it's much easier to remove stuff later than plough through Mandrake's maze of sub-menus at install time.
    • Similar reason means my Lappy's now running Debian - when install time came around, the ability to do everything over wifi (automatically detected I might add) stomped all over the last distro I used (Mandrake 9) with it's 3 CD's of gumpf.
      • 9.1 does that, 9.2 does it well, and they're now up to seven CDs of gumpf in the official version.

        OTTOMH, the main Debian repositories for fauxSarge are up over 7GB anyway, which is ~10 CDs worth of gumpf. (-:

        Yes, I'm happy that your laptop works well, but your reasoning isn't holding much water.
    • by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @07:19PM (#12006312) Homepage Journal
      Urpmi makes it a breeze to install everything on Mandrake.

      Urpmi is THE main reason why I haven't sought out another distro. I quit using Red Hat in favor of Mandrake because I got sick of rpm-depend-hell. Urpmi solved that forever. I don't particularly like the options that they compiled Apache with, but that's minimal compared to trolling through rpm-depends.

      LK
      • Fedora's "yum" makes dependancy hell a thing of the past, by and large. Just for the record. :)

        From the site...
        "Yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages. It makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm." - http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/
        • by redhog ( 15207 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:25PM (#12007472) Homepage
          Yes, except yum is much inferior to urpmi, both theoretically (urpmi has better algorithms and datastructures) and practically (yum has a shitload of bugs, such as big problems working with an install-root different from /). urpmi and apt-get are on par with each other in my experience (mature, good performance scaling), and I can't see why redhat shose yum, as both apt-get for rpm and urpmi are available to them and are both superior...

          A proof of how bad yum really is, is that some people have independently set up Fedora repositories managed by apt-get!
          • A proof of how bad yum really is, is that some people have independently set up Fedora repositories managed by apt-get!

            Bullshit.
            Freshrpms.net [freshrpms.net] had apt long before yum was even around.
          • Yes, except yum is much inferior to urpmi, both theoretically (urpmi has better algorithms and datastructures) and practically (yum has a shitload of bugs, such as big problems working with an install-root different from /). urpmi and apt-get are on par with each other in my experience (mature, good performance scaling), and I can't see why redhat shose yum, as both apt-get for rpm and urpmi are available to them and are both superior...

            apt-get has major deficiencies in regards to multilib support (32 an

            • Yes, yum is buggy and apt-get doesn't work with mixed 32/64 bit systems. Smart [zorked.net], however, is looking good - although currently still in development.

              I don't know how well these three compare to urpmi. Does urpmi handle multiple installed versions of a package (eg, both 32 and 64 bit) correctly?
            • I would never encourage an increase in complexity for a limited-time benefit (OOo, as every other open-source application, will be 64-bit clean with time - I am surprised it's not yet). Two years from now, I doubt you will be able to buy a 32 bit x86 processor. Having 32 and 64 bit libraries coexisting in the same system is somewhat of a kluge.

              That said, I would consider AMD64 as a different platform that can emulate 32 bit x86 with hardware assistance. I would not advise relying on x86 software running on
      • Have you considered compiling Apache yourself now that you have all of the dependencies installed? Even if there are a few more, you'll still have far fewer to handle than if you started without using Urpmi.

        Another thing to note, Fedora's yum is pretty competent as far as I've found, and you can always install apt-get on top of that.
      • What Apache options should be changed? If you have good ideas, you should tell the maintainers. Do a rpm -qa apache2, and e-mail both Oden and me (jmdault), so we can improve the package.
      • ...but that's minimal compared to trolling through rpm-depends.

        Beats the hell out of trolling through my grandfather's depends.
    • I agree mandrake's networking sucks, especially when trying to set up multiple configurations for a single card, as with my wireless card.

      This is why I took mandrake as it is except for networking. I told the wizard not to touch any network interfaces - ever - and wrote my own script to act as a front end to iwconfig and manage my configs.

      Now everything is great in mandrakeland, especially since I just found the PLF online package repository, clearing up my last major gripe (lack of available automatical
      • You *just* found PLF? Welcome to 2005 brother. Don't forget about easyurpmi.zarb.org for your easy package goodness.

        With contrib, main, plf free and non-free, jpackage and maybe one other, there's a gigantic heap of software an urpmi packagename* away.

        By the way, totally offtopic, but how do you get those 'other' distros to guess package names? I don't understand how apt does that, haven't seen anything in the docs for it either.
    • It was probably the switch to a 2.6 that was the root of that problem.
  • by nodehopper ( 839304 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @07:19PM (#12006319) Homepage

    I have tried many different flavors of Linux. Fedora, Slackware, Debian, Mandrake and my new favorite Suse 9.2. I have to say that my subjective impression of Mandrake is that it is just odd. This doesn't surprise me then that they would make some odd business decisions.

    Many of the distros features seemed like they had been thrown in with the basic intent of trying to be like Windows and now this naming scheme seems to remind me of the same thing.

    'Limited Edition 2005'= 'Windows ME'

    Just sounds too similar for my taste!

    • Mandrake's installation is a little heavy, but it's ease of use will make most newbies pretty happy.
      • Well, I guess I belong to the "newbies" (at least not hardcore) users that have caused DistroWatch's distro list dramatically change to look like this in a short period of time:

        1. Mandrakelinux, 1509 hits / day, going down
        2. Ubuntu, 1371 h/d, going up
        3. Fedora, 1352 h/d, going down
        4. MEPIS, 1204 h/d, going up

        I'm currently a happy MEPIS user for it being Debian based with the great apt-get tools while preserving the simplicity of e.g. Mandrake and the simplicity of... well, not exactly Mandrake or Fedora.
        • I see my post above may not have made it very clear what I meant with "simplicity of Mandrake and not exactly the simplicity of Mandrake". I meant that the Mandrake install was all great for me, and everything seemed to work just fine out of the box, but when I started to use it more, I started get confused from the multiple apps included doing the same thing, etc. It was a strange experience for a user coming from Windows and having seen Mac OS X before as well. I couldn't really see why the Mandrake insta
          • Gee, the reason the Mandrake install was so much larger than the Windows XP install didn't have anything to do with software did it? Microsoft gives you almost nothing. A crappy mail client, a bad browser, a bad IM client that needs to be upgraded immediately, and a slow, buggy, nearly codec-less media player. They throw in a few drivers as well, but most of the time post-install, the first thing you do is go get all new drivers for everything.

            When Microsoft starts including every major app most people u
      • Have they improved their upgrading between versions yet?

        This isn't a troll or snarky question. I gave up on Mandrake around version 7 or 8 when they had flaky drivers of one sort or another.

        Of course, I moved to Debian, so upgrading between stable versions became a moot point -- Doh! All kidding aside, though, the only way to 'enjoy' Debian's quality in 'testing' (on a personal workstation, mind) was to have a good net connection.

        At the time I was located in southern Italy, and our connections were poor.
        • Yes, upgrades are improved.

          I tried it a few times in the past, and never got usable results. Upgrading was a slow process where the system ground and crunched for a while, finally producing a spooged system that needed to be wiped out anyway.

          With 10.1, the upgrade actually worked! Wonders never cease.
          • I, on the other hand, never got 10.1 to work. Kept hanging up in the installer. It was the infamous VIA USB bugs...
            • ...one of the updated kernels, 2.6.8.1-12mdk, caused some machines to get all crashy. Updating them to 2.6.8.1-24mdk a few days later made it all shiny and good again, but it was an uncomfortable feeling while it lasted. Other than that, Mnadrake've been pretty good about reliability and pretty quick with working updates.

              When Debian has an installer as point-and-click easy as Mandrake's (or better), makes their package management a little more intutive (some of the "not installed" status and stuff is kind
              • Well, I take your point about Debian being a bit opaque. For me, when I switched six years ago, it came down to deciding whether I would put up with brokenness on a fairly regular basis, or roll up my sleeves and learn a bit more about configuring a Debian system.

                As I started out with Linux some two years before that on a new shitty PC-Chips pile of poo with RH 5.1 I couldn't even get the GUI to come up for six weeks. I tell you, had to learn to love the command line fast ... but I had been in the same sit
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by Anonymous Coward
          Are you sure its not your own incompetence?
          E is running nicely here...
        • Nonsense.

          They are only calling a limited edition because it will not be sold through retail. Stop spreading FUD that helps nobody. Sometimes, we, in the Linux commmunity do so much damage to ourselves just so that we can prop "arbitrary preferred distribution".

          Mandrake 10.1 is a beautiful distribution. Urpmi and easy urpmi, a web site that allows anyone to set up repositories easily, are wonderful. Which other distribution besides Debian gives you 10,000 packages that install perfectly on a box?

          And compi
        • Ease of use, just until you want to compile practically anything at all.

          my Mandy 10.1 compiled out of the box nvidia kernel modules, latest k3b, qlo10k1 and heaps of other software. i think you have problem between chair and keyboard :-)
    • " I have to say that my subjective impression of Mandrake is that it is just odd."
      "Score:3, Informative"
      Huh?
      What does switching to an annual release cycle (better for those who use the community version) have to do with being odd?
      I have to say that nodehopper is a dipshit. This is exactly as informative as his saying that Mandrake is odd.
      I ran the IT for an organization with 150 users with Mandrake Linux, what is his point?
      Yes, it uses Perl in place of shell scripts in lots of places. And it is different
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21, 2005 @07:22PM (#12006345)
    The place where Linux has a real competitive advantage is the less wealthy countries. Compared to the other costs in an organization, the Microsoft tax is a much bigger deal there. What they need is a local source of Linux expertise. They can't pay European wage rates. So, as long as Mandrake doesn't corrupt Conectiva's value chain, they have bought their way into a growth market. Having the distro may just be the cost of entry into the market. As long as they don't try to subsidize the distro with the Brazilian business, they may have found a winning business model.
  • From the blurb.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Infinityis ( 807294 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @07:24PM (#12006363) Homepage
    "I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2 release, without anybody announcing it to the community"

    I could be mistaken, but wouldn't that announcement qualify as an announcement to the community?
    • >I spent nights translating some packages to be on schedule for the 10.2 release. I was quite disappointed (snip)

      Oh, the so-called OSS syndrome (Open Source Slave syndrome)..
      Hopefully that'll teach him that it's safer to pick a non-commercial distro (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.) to contribute to in the future!

      >I could be mistaken, but wouldn't that announcement qualify as an announcement to the community?

      I guess he meant the announcement wasn't about the v10.2 per se but rather about the combining of pack
    • Yes, it WOULD if only they did not present us -the translators- a tight schedule for the 10.2 release. Then they silently canceled the release after delaying it a lot. This means I did a lot of rush work for nothing...
      • by Anonymous Coward
        "the upcoming 10.2 becomes a transitional release, labeled 'Limited Edition 2005."

        That says to me that it's been renamed, not cancelled.
      • The real question is how you can you feel let down when the 10.2 is only renamed and not canceled?
        Maybe they did translate badly that part of the announcement but in french one it's quite clear: the 10.2 is now the "mdk 2005 l-e", and the real new product will appear in fall 2005 as the "mandrakelinux 2006".
  • by iminplaya ( 723125 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @07:34PM (#12006429) Journal
    Mandrake to Acquire Conectiva [slashdot.org]

    For the REALLY amnesic:
    Mandrakesoft Acquires Conectiva [slashdot.org]
  • by Anonymous Coward
    I've been waiting for distros to start releasing products yearly. It would be a major improvement if all distros did this. When you're in an office/work environment, it is much easier to remember which what computers need to be upgraded, when the version number is simply a year. It will also be much easier to find packages on the internet, because it's easier for package makers to put everything together when they know that all the libraries, executables, etc. are stable for one year (and they will know mo
  • by linuxbeta ( 837266 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @07:46PM (#12006529)
    shots.osdir.com [osdir.com]
  • by publicworker ( 701313 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @07:48PM (#12006547)
    In a nutshell: the upcoming 10.2 becomes a transitional release, labeled 'Limited Edition 2005.' ... ["]I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2["]

    So the unhappy Mandrake community members are the ones that don't understand the new naming scheme?
    • So the unhappy Mandrake community members are the ones that don't understand the new naming scheme?

      We would have been even more unhappy if they had chosen to name it Mandrake Edition 2005. My personal qualm is that if they think a yearly release is best, how good of a job can they do of merging the distros for a stable release in just six months?

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Not being a smart ass but serious.

    If Mandrake does not work with the Mandrake community, you should fork and create a new community and release your own distro.

    It is free software after all.
    • done.

      PClinuxOS has done just that. It is a live-cd that is installable and generally is a bit more up to date than Mandrake.
      http://www.pclinuxonline.com/pclos/ind e x.html

      This project was started by Texstar who used to supply updated rpms for Mandrake (such as the latest kde) when the official Mandrake community did not.

      It has those parts of Mandrake that I liked (such as unified menus, which allows you to use whatever window manager that you wish and still have the same menu structure) and ditches those
      • by Anonymous Coward
        Mandrake move is a better distro for recovery than Ubuntu or Knoppix...

        still more live disks out there though...
  • Bastards. (Score:5, Funny)

    by jusdisgi ( 617863 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @07:59PM (#12006633)

    I was quite disappointed when I discovered that a new roadmap has been announced and that there will NOT be any 10.2 release, without anybody announcing it to the community.

    I know just what he means; nothing pisses me off like somebody telling me something, and not telling me about it. Bastards.

    • I know just what he means; nothing pisses me off like somebody telling me something, and not telling me about it.

      I would imagine the complaint is about the unilateral way it was done. Since there will be a (somewhat unclear) release of the current 10.2 beta, why not just leave the 10.2 roadmap as planned? The Limited Edition moniker makes me wonder if the "official" release is being dropped (which would leave 10.2 in permanent beta, or Fedora mode :) and that is the problem. Mandrake should institute

      • You got exactly the feeling I was trying to express: frustration over my work mostly thrown away, since 2005 will be somethig "transitional", and probably just few people will use it. And for Mdk 2006 I guess a LOT of work would need to be done (since merging in conectiva stuff will give us more headhache). I think that mandrake should raelly care more about communicating their strategic decisions on time to their users and contributors.
        • Well, whatever. "A rose by any other name" and whatnot. Maybe fewer people will use a "Limited Edition" release, but then fewer people would upgrade to a minor version upgrade than Mdk 11, so I guess I just don't see the same significance in the change.

          But that's not really the point either. The thrust of my joke was that the real issue you have here is that the decision was made...not so much that it wasn't announced. Because it was announced, as witnessed by these complaints about the announcement.

          • Well, whatever. "A rose by any other name" and whatnot. Maybe fewer people will use a "Limited Edition" release, but then fewer people would upgrade to a minor version upgrade than Mdk 11, so I guess I just don't see the same significance in the change.

            The problem appears to be that there will never be an "official" release, leaving all the work done for the scheduled release forever in beta.

            But that's not really the point either. The thrust of my joke was that the real issue you have here is that the

        • Agreed, this seemed to come out of nowhere when we were all beginning to believe that Mandrake was being really open about their operations. I can understand that there are business reasons to withold some things, but this transition seems odd, ill-timed, and out of sequence. If you have contributed to the distro, then as a Mandrake user, I'll just say thanks for your work.
  • by mandolin ( 7248 ) on Monday March 21, 2005 @09:01PM (#12007253)
    ... the press release at least doesn't seem very informative.

    I think I remember Conectiva pioneered APT-rpm. Is Mandrake planning on ditching urpmi? (I thought it was supposed to compare favorably with yum/up2date). Or has Conectiva got tons of experience with udev, and Mandrake would like to replace supermount, or something? Or is this all just to say Mandrake-"2006" will have pretty good brazilean portugese support?

    What exactly does Conectiva have to offer?

  • And that is the way their GUI system config program, drakconf, doesn't seem to interact with CLI tools properly. Something caused my network setup to go down the toilet; When I try to figure things out, drakconf says one thing and ifconfig/route/netstat/etc seem to say another. I say "drakconf, delete eth0", and ifconfig still shows it. In the end, I gave up and just canned all network settings and setup the network from scratch (not a big deal: 1 DSL modem, two 10/100 cards), but I shouldn't have had to. Other than that, I think that the keypad-like (as opposed to side bar) button layout of Drakconf in 10.0 sucked bigtime from the usability perspective - good thing that changed with 10.1.

    Main things I like are that Mdk unifies the look and feel of KDE and Gnome. It's GUI tools are friendly enough for everyday tasks but you can still go back to the CLI any time you want the power. Oh yeah - did I mention that Konqueror starts in about 2 seconds, eats ~5MB of memory per instance, and has tabbed browsing?
  • Mandrake totally refused to install on my Athlon64 box. I think it was the VIA SATA that did it.

    That was kind of sad, but I don't care, I'm posting this from a Kubuntu LiveCD running on my primary Windows machine. It's completely fantastic, waayyy better than Gnome, super friendly and Konqueror is really nice too.

    Little does it know, but Windows is going bye-bye ... finally the Linux Desktop surpassed XP !! The trickle will soon turn to a flood ;-)
    • did you try the most current version?

      I know the via SATA broke 9.2 and I think 10.0 on mine and you had to add the driver yourself (just like in windows set up, you have to add the SATA driver when it asks for scsi)

  • Mandrake and they are nice, but I think Mandrake is quite foolish to place so much emphasis on the desktop unless they have a major deal with HP or Gateway and something to guaruntee them retails shelf space.
  • Very difficult to get EPS (I bought it) onto Mandrake. Cups very difficult to not install. Dependency hell to unistall one dependency of Cups - tied into everything. So - back to rpm and forget dependencies. EPS has some drivers for some printers that their freeware cups does not have.

    Also, on two different computers, and on both distro 10.0 and 10.1 the gui find does not work for me. I put it up as a question twice (I belong to Mandrake club) and no reply except to check locate (yes locate works well f
    • KDE 3.4 (pulled from THACS repository) seems to have a SMALLER memory footprint than 3.2, and feels faster. YMMV, no empirical testing other than using it and looking at gkrellm for free memory while in use.

      Running 10.1 and quite happy, glad to see a longer release cycle for stabilities sake.
      (Not of the "it crashes" variety, it never has, but of the package versioning type)

      I have no idea what EPS is, but 10.1 found and used my Epson CX5400 and its built in scanner without issue. The prints are amazing.
  • by imr ( 106517 ) on Tuesday March 22, 2005 @03:25AM (#12009725)
    I use the distro since its first versions and one of its biggest grief was its development cycle.

    To have official releases wich would go to retail with issues which needed only a little more time to be fixed, was quite difficult to stand for an end user oriented distro (I'm not talking of the corporate version here whose development is quite different).
    It made support on the forums quite difficult, especially since it gathers a lot of linux beginner, whom you have to explain a lot of things at once to fix small but annoying issues.
    The other problem was that the community version wasnt that different (in fact not different at all) from the official version, and lost its meaning quite fast.

    Now, as I understand things, in a little while, we will have a more polished and stable release going to retail for those who like the userfriendlyness of the distro but hate its bugs, and more frequent bleeding edge community versions (3 or 4 a year) which will satisfy those wanting to absolutly have the latest KDE or Gnome or those who want to hunt the last irritating bugs that escaped the cookers (the dev community).

    Perfect!
    Kudos to Mandrakesoft to take the risk to skip one income date in order to improve the quality of the distro.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      I was going to say I haven't seen anywhere mentioning this but then I noticed Warly suggesting it on the mailing lists [mandrakelinux.com]. So long as there are at least two non-commerical yearly releases per year I'd continue to be Mandrakelinux user (I don't want to use a "rolling distro" like Debian unstable/Gentoo so switching to cooker wasn't an option). The worry is how long you get security updates / fixes for. If it's less than 1 year / 2 releases or not at all then the deal doesn't look so good.

      I consdier this to be
      • Interresting link, thanks.
        He said it also in the december chat on the mandrakeclub. He was talking of 4 releases at that time, 3 seems more feasible.
        The good part of this system would be that the community release schedule could be flexible.
        I mean, just upgrading the current rpms doesnt take as long as incorporating a new glib or kernel, for example.

        I consdier this to be analogous to the Fedora/RHEL model used by Red Hat and rumour has it that SUSE will turn into something similar (with Novell Linux Deskt
  • Later, by fall of this year, the new boxed "2006" release will fully integrate Conectiva technology and Mandrakesoft online services into a new product. It will be released through traditional retail channels as well as by direct sale from Mandrakestore and Mandrakeclub, and will offer all support options and related services.
    Note that there is no mention of a download option for Mandrakeclub. Am I missing something?
  • I am (?have been until now?) a big Mandrake fan
    One of the great things about Mandrake for me has been how up to date it has been generally...
    SuSE also prides itself on being up to date. That said though, after the release of the 2005 Ltd Edition (i.e. what would have been Mandrake 10.2,
    as currently in beta/rc testing), there will then only be released builds annually? An awful lot
    happens in the Linux/GNU community in one year...
    This to me seems a big step backwards (yes I know you can keep up to dateish via
    • They want to have a stable, fully supported release for corporate, educational, and home use. Like what Redhat has, with their enterprise release schedule. It's nothing new. Redhat just now adopted the 2.6 kernel in their enterprise version, I believe, after hanging on to the stable 2.4 for so long, not to mention relatively old software versions, by most 'bleeding edge' power users' standards. Going for stable over newest.
  • UnitedLinux lives (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Lproven ( 6030 )
    So now that SuSE has gone all big-American-corporate, the remaining members of the UnitedLinux project are consolidating. How long until MandrakeConnectiva acquires TurboLinux, I wonder? Then they'd have all the emerging markets covered - for whatever that's worth.

    For my money, I reckon Red Hat should have bought Ximian, rather than SuSE, thus getting all the GNOME folks under one roof. And then Mandrake, to acquire an easy consumer distro; Mandrake's Red Hat based anyway. SuSE & Connectiva should have
  • by suezz ( 804747 )
    I think this is great - this what the community needed - seems like everyone is wanting to jump on the 6 month release cycle bandwagon lately.
  • finally linux distro's are starting to make sense. I like having a yearly release, or better yet, once every 3 or so years would be the best. This way you can really work on features that you wanna add to your distro, plus its cheaper in the long run for support costs. IE 1 release instead of 2.

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