The first Mageia alpha is available

Mandrake was the Ubuntu of its time, before it was gutted by a combination of bad calendar (IPO while the dot-com bubble was bursting), stupid investors (who wanted Mandrake to spread itself into other activities like e-learning), Hearst Publishing (Mandrake the Magician wanted his name back, Mandrake had to pay them to shut up and change their name) and overall crappy management (Mandriva communication was the anti-Ubuntu: bad, bad, baaad).

Technically, they were a mix of Redhat and Debian (Redhat layout, but debian menu, the first RPM equivalent to apt and online repositories) with KDE and good administration tools that still allowed for old-school configuration. Good stuff, but their Q&A was not always up to snuff (the joke was a good release followed by a crappy one).

Good luck to them, they did much for early Linux useability, and the distribution remains a cut above most of the crowd. I've been using them since the 5.2 days, and all my forays into other distributions have been disappointing.

.. And someone might not know what Language or Database means in computer parlance. LWN is not catering to complete newbies. If someone doesn't know what Mandriva is, google up.