Mandrakesoft, Conectiva to merge

Posted Feb 25, 2005 11:30 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

I expect Mandrake to use this to lose that
name, for that reason, as well,
altho I'm not sure it'll be Conectiva they adopt. "Connectdrake", anyone?
<g> Maybe "Condrake"? <hmm... maybe not...> "Mandriva"? <g>

I'm glad Mandrake's getting some kernel folks with quite the name
recognition as well, in the form of Marcelo T., and R. Van Riel (is he
still with Conectiva?). Among other things, having that sort of known
kernel expertise should improve their chance at landing big accounts that
like that sort of technical resources available, making them more
competitive with Novell/SuSE and Red Hat. I know Mandrake had several
other community projects and the fact that they didn't go the freedom
lacking route of SuSE (worse b4 Novell) I always appreciated, but
Conectiva as small and mainly regional as it was got a lot of respect for
having those kernel hackers, that Mandrake was missing.

I was a Mandrake user for a couple years, but left them for Gentoo when it
became plain Mandrake wasn't interested in an up-to-date AMD64 release.
(Cooker for AMD64 basically consists of the latest community release of
their x86/i586 stuff, while i586 cooker has long since moved on to working
on the next release. When I left, Mandrake's KDE on AMD64 was fully two
release versions behind the official KDE release (and what was available
for x86 Cooker, which often had /pre/-release KDE available -- BTW, I'm
running KDE-3.4-rc2 on Gentoo/AMD64 as I write this). This was /not/ due
to any particular problem with porting to AMD64, either, as Gentoo had the
current KDE available for AMD64.)

Also, when I upgraded to my dual Opteron /desktop/ workstation, I set
reserved $100+ to go to Mandrake, as my distrib of choice at the time.
Unfortunately, try as I might, I couldn't find a suitable Mandrake product
to spend it on. (They didn't offer any personal/desktop AMD64 product for
purchase, only business, and that only as a set of physical CDs that would
be pretty much outdated by the time they shipped. Club? All it seemed to
be about at the time was i586. There was a torrent for amd64 released a
bit belatedly, but no AMD64 club forums, no way to vote for AMD64 in club
votes, etc. Further, both sets included some slaveware/proprietaryware as
well, and I've no interest in funding that, even indirectly. Ironically,
it would have been better for my relationship with Mandrake had I /not/
decided I wanted to spend money on them, as one doesn't expect as much
from a product one isn't paying for.)

Maybe with the developer team from Conectiva, this will change, altho I've
long since realized the Gentoo community distribution concept fits me
better anyway, and don't see it as likely that I'll be moving back,
personally. (If I did move back to a binary-emphasis distrib, it'd likely
be to the community based Debian, which is likely where I would have ended
up had it not been for Gentoo.) I'd still recommend Mandrake to those
Linux newbies on x86, however, particularly those with older equipment
that wouldn't take well to from source emphasis distributions like Gentoo,
and to those not so pleasurably challenged by the leading and sometimes
bleeding edge, as I find myself.

Duncan (still reflecting some of my frustration from the time)

Posted Mar 5, 2005 16:47 UTC (Sat) by fcrozat (subscriber, #175) [Link]

> The synergies are obvious, and the happy couple have been good friends for > long. For as long as I can remember, Mandrakes has used the Galaxy theme,
> which is made by a Conectiva employee.

This is completely false. Mandrakegalaxy theme was done internaly at Mandrakesoft.