Mandriva (ex Mandrake) Linux Founder Gael Duval (LinuxQuestions.org) [LWN.net]

LinuxQuestions.org interviews Mandriva's Gaël Duval. "LQ) There have been rumors that some Linux distributors, including Novell, may follow what Red Hat has done and have an Enterprise release and a "Community" release. Is this direction something that has been considered by Mandriva? GD) No. Mandriva Linux will still be distributed as both a download edition and commercial offers, with full official support for updates (bugfixes, security)."

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Odd question, odd answer

Posted May 3, 2005 1:22 UTC (Tue) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link] (5 responses)

Mandrake's practice of making a Community/Download edition available on-line and then releasing fully supported commercial editions a month or so later kind of pre-dates Red Hat's Fedora a bit.

Odd question, odd answer

Posted May 3, 2005 9:15 UTC (Tue) by gduval (guest, #11868) [Link] (4 responses)

Sorry maybe I sounded confusing: Mandriva's "download version" (which provides more than 10,000 packages with the LE2005), is officially supported by the company.

For instance if you look at:
http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDKSA-20...
which is an advisory for XPM, you can see that the updated packages are available for the LE2005, like there are for the Corporate Server 2.1 or 3.0.

Hi, thanks for reading, and almost a good point

Posted May 3, 2005 10:56 UTC (Tue) by leonbrooks (guest, #1494) [Link]

The quality of the official versions is higher, and full support was always included with the purchase. User support for the Community releases was in principle limited to whatever Google could find for you (IOW, about the same value as the support MS ships with, say, XP :-). In practice, the Cooker list in particular is very helpful, since problems reported there are likely to result in fixes to the Official version, and general awareness of Mandrake and Mandrake issues has always been reasonably high.

For example, I was delighted when the obscure WinBond memory-stick reader (and other random things) chip in my laptop suddenly started working under the Mandrake kernel provided in the 10.2/2005LE download version specifically because of non-mainstream patches that Mandrake shipped with their kernel, and only thought to try it again with 10.2/2005LE because of a post referencing both Mandrake and the device.

Fedora and Community are not exact parallels, but I assert that Mandrake pioneered the general concept amongst Linux distros. I prefer Mandrake's (now Mandriva's) approach, but that may just be me. It'll be interesting to see what influence Conectiva has on the partnership.

A couple of requests, since you're reading anyway: can you clone Warly? We need at least three of him. (-:

Oh, and can we pretty please get rid of the "stoned penguin" theme completely for the 2006 release? It terrifies people. On the gripping hand, it did lead me to finally put together my own theme set to integrate into my own version of the release.

Odd question ?,...

Posted May 3, 2005 15:05 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] (2 responses)

Maybe Mandriva the most friendlier "End User Supported Distro" in a community development style similar to Debian and Gentoo, should change default package format to something much better, like "smart" ?

http://smartpm.org/

It would better than a "from source Distro" like Gentoo, and much better than "SRPMS", because it would would provide a more flexible way to compile from source and it would still provide the same binary distribution possibilitys (belive "smart" was first developed at Conectiva) !

Thought not bad, it only misses Linux the same *Hardware Manufactors Involvement* that windows has, to start soaring among the low tech end users masses. ( http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2403&... )

Odd question ?,...

Posted May 3, 2005 15:24 UTC (Tue) by lamikr (subscriber, #2289) [Link] (1 responses)

Currently the urpmi which is a tool build over RPM works very well for
solving dependencies in Mandrake.
But there has also been quite much discussion from smart in the
Mandriva cooker list.
(New releases of smartpm like 0.29, 0.30, etc. has been announced in
this list)

Odd question ?,... or not?

Posted May 3, 2005 17:25 UTC (Tue) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

URPMI is uggly for the end user as well as entreprises building their own repositorys.

The idea is not only dependencies, but to finnish once for all the Fedora, or Suse or Mandriva RPM jungle. There should be only *ONE* package. Other distros wont comply because much of the mentality is the same that drove Unix to almost extinction. So why not Mandriva have 'Smart Channels' from all those binary or sources, rpms,debs,dpcks..., already out there and transform that to something like a *autoexectuble file* that could not only cleanly install the binarys but also compile from source and then install... perhaps some how merging with the 'Autopackage' framework would be a good idea, since they dont have a package manager engine defined... and merging projects is something sorely missied in Linux, and cause of fragmentation!...

All in all Smart is a superior Package Manager,period.

Transform it into a *Standard* would be simple once even users from other distros, and OSes(yes Windows, why not?), would start to sign to Mandriva Club to have a "Universal Repository". Perhaps that wouldn't happen soon with so closed mentality in the Linux world, and with Distros pushing so hard for the NIH syndrome. But will explode when the Low tech masses have *acess*. And IM(very)HO, low tech masses will have *acess*, or Linux will dye, because Microsoft will show again that server cannot stand proudly alone, superior, and untoched, and make sorry once again all those NIH priests.

Vector Graphic Application need to be supported!

Posted May 3, 2005 16:55 UTC (Tue) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link] (1 responses)

Mr. Duval claims that GNU/Linux is not ready for the desktop because some traditional software is missing. His example being general purpose vector drawing packages and he wants more offerings by proprietary vendors. I would prefer more promotion of the applications that we already have, like Skencil (previously called Bernhard Herzog's Sketch). My company has designed a lot of business graphics with Skencil and continues to do so and thus helps Skencil. Mandriva's business is coming out from Free Software applications and they should help to find a business model for them or directly sponsor it.

Vector Graphic Application need to be supported!

Posted May 3, 2005 23:31 UTC (Tue) by njhurst (guest, #6022) [Link]

Indeed what about Inkscape?