Fired, simply fired. [LWN.net]

Gaël Duval talks about leaving Mandriva and some plans for the future. "I've been working for one year during lost hours on a new project of Open-Source operating system called "Ulteo" (the concept has been proposed to Mandriva at the end of 2004, but not "selected"). I hope that I can launch a first version of the product in the next weeks. If this concept can prove itself to be valid, it could imply an important change in how people are using Linux in particular and operating-systems in general. Check contents and subscribe at http://www.ulteo.com if you want to learn more in the future." (Thanks to Alex Fernandez)

to post comments

Good luck

Posted Mar 18, 2006 0:44 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

I would like to wish good luck to Gaël Duval in his new project. Sometimes it is good to leave old baggage behind and start anew. And it's a good sign that he ackowledges some of the problems Mandriva has: quality control first and foremost, since for a distro it is an essential prerequisite; user base grooming next.

Sadly it is hard to know what Ulteo is: there is only an "about" page with some vague information, and the download link is not working (it seems that the hosting company is not happy with the traffic load). Let us hope that Duval will now find the time to find a new service provider, and tell us more details about the project. You know, quality control and user base grooming...

Good luck

Posted Mar 18, 2006 9:33 UTC (Sat) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

From what little there is, it looks like another live-cd distro?

Good luck

Posted Mar 18, 2006 16:01 UTC (Sat) by finster (guest, #32338) [Link]

From the animatation on the linked site, it appears to be a way to control your pet dog with a computer. (sorry!)

Ultewhat?

Posted Mar 18, 2006 1:04 UTC (Sat) by shredwheat (guest, #4188) [Link] (8 responses)

If the Ulteo website is any indication of the project, it is already doomed. Apparantly if they told anyone what is was they would know how worthless it really is.

Ultewhat?

Posted Mar 18, 2006 2:45 UTC (Sat) by phgrenet (guest, #5979) [Link]

Come on. Give these guys a chance...

Ultewhat?

Posted Mar 18, 2006 4:41 UTC (Sat) by canbaby (guest, #28798) [Link]

dot com? I prefer dot org

Ultewhat?

Posted Mar 18, 2006 6:19 UTC (Sat) by h2 (guest, #27965) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe this isn't the best introduction:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Bet they messed up with mod_rewrite or something

Actually,

Posted Mar 18, 2006 10:46 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link]

Their hosting company screwed them. Yesterday there was some text saying
that "we are looking for another hosting etc". Wait and see. :-)

I don't get it... kind of disrespectful, uh?

Posted Mar 18, 2006 11:40 UTC (Sat) by hummassa (guest, #307) [Link] (3 responses)

IRT a guy that helped a LOT to advance the state of desktop linux.

OT: A new one on me

Posted Mar 18, 2006 14:49 UTC (Sat) by X-Nc (guest, #1661) [Link] (2 responses)

IRT? What's that stand for?

IRT abbreviation?

Posted Mar 18, 2006 19:04 UTC (Sat) by Max.Hyre (subscriber, #1054) [Link]

A subway line in New York City?

[ :-) ]

IRT == "In {Regards|Reference} To"

Posted Mar 19, 2006 3:02 UTC (Sun) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link]

... it's a new one on me, too. However, it's clear from context IMNSHO. :)

(Usually I avoid such alphabet soup ... but in this case I couldn't resist).

JimD

Fork...please!

Posted Mar 18, 2006 16:22 UTC (Sat) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (21 responses)

I really hope that someone forks Mandriva. In many ways it is excellent, but also, I think it's doomed. [I run quite a few Mandriva systems, and have paid for the club, so I am sympathetic; nevertheless, I feel that a migration may soon be necessary.]

There are, in my view, 3 things that are very serious problems.

1)Community. Mandriva has virtually stopped communicating with the community. Mandrivaclub has almost no news, and it is impossible to provide feedback. The excellent mandrivauser.org has vanished too. Also, they've lost sight of the Club's aims. The point is to fund the "street performer model" in which users who like the distro pay to keep it free. I think that all of the packages should be in the public release, and privileges of the club should be restricted to the forum, commercial RPMs, and (perhaps) a slightly earlier release and some dedicated mirrors.

2)Quality. There are a lot of wonderful things in Mandriva. But something bad happened to 2006. Perhaps I was unlucky, but a lot was the fault of the corporate pressure (released too early, broken Xorg, broken kat etc).
Far worse than this is that there have been almost no bugfix packages released.

3)Release cycle. At the moment, there are releases only once a year (with some club-only updates, and a few external sources like seerofsouls.com). This means that the distro is always out of date. Worse, it harms the upstream community, because Mandriva users cannot contribute timely bug reports. [Cooker is too unstable for daily use.]

The result is that Mandriva's best assets, (the community of technical users, outside the immediate developers, aka geeks) are disappearing. This will ultimately eradicate the goodwill and the donations which keep it alive. I'd hate to see it happen - and I hope that the distro will fork away from the company.

Incidentally, I posted something similar to cooker: about half the developers agreed with me, but the corporate managers do not.
There are some fabulous things in Mandriva, and it's still (I think) the best, but it is fading very fast.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 18, 2006 20:34 UTC (Sat) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (16 responses)

Couldn't agree more! I too have been bitten by a malfunctioning xorg in the newest Mandriva, and what's worse, once when I installed security updates, they broke it yet again. Also had to uninstall kat long ago...

Although it might already be too late for a fork. I think the mandrake community has vanished during the past year as well, and it's been dropping on Distrowatch and other stats, it hasn't even been a 2nd choice for a long time now. Remember that before Ubuntu came to exist, Mandrake was still a solid nr 1 as a desktop distro on these stats.

Personally, I had already decided that this is my last mandrake/iva, and my next Linux will be something else. Gael being fired actually puts a nice ending to the story, now the captain is free to go and wont be sinking together with his Titanic. Cause it is sinking.

My biggest gripe is, with Mandrake out of the game, Suse hijacked by Ximian, there is no mainstream distro left to offer KDE as a first choice and focusing it's energy on it. So I'm a bit lost at the moment, it will be interesting to see where I end up. This fact is even more interesting for example in light of recent LinuxQuestions poll (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1848) KDE is preferred desktop for 65% of us (Gnome is second with 26%). It seems that somewhere somebody is not meeting customer demand...

So there are questions in my head at the moment. How serious is Kubuntu, are there any full time people working on it? How many volunteers working on it? What are the KDE devs themselves using these days?

KDE distros?

Posted Mar 18, 2006 21:08 UTC (Sat) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

My biggest gripe is, with Mandrake out of the game, Suse hijacked by Ximian, there is no mainstream distro left to offer KDE as a first choice and focusing it's energy on it. So I'm a bit lost at the moment, it will be interesting to see where I end up.

"Samat sanat". I have long used Mandr* at home (and paid the club dues), but now not sure if will continue. I guess Kubuntu could be it next. Isn't Slackware only shipping KDE but not Gnome these days? Although in its case you probably still cannot call it a KDE-first distro, its idea of convenient configuration being text files, and all this GUI sillyness is always definitely just an add-on... But the idea of going back to Slackware has certain appeal after an odyssey with these "user-friendly" distros.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 18, 2006 21:10 UTC (Sat) by linuxrocks123 (guest, #34648) [Link] (5 responses)

> there is no mainstream distro left to offer KDE as a first choice and focusing it's energy on it.

Is Slackware not mainstream enough for you? They're 10 on distrowatch (though falling; they always do right before a new release :).

They don't customize KDE much, if that's what you mean by focusing energy on it, but they do offer KDE as a stable, default desktop environment. I'm a long-time user of the distro, and it's only gotten better since they removed Gnome.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 18, 2006 22:16 UTC (Sat) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (4 responses)

I just don't think the Slackware philosophy is for me. I like using GUI configuration tools. I'd like to use the same distro my wife will use and that we'll install for our parents, i.e. even if I consider myself an advanced Linux user, I have no need to always configure things as what I see "the hard way".

Also, it's quite okay to have Gnome too, I've always installed it although almost never use it. I just want to have KDE as getting the most love from my distro. (Which actually wasn't happening with Mandrake either. They kept it the default option because majority of users wanted it that way, but they used GTK for their own tools. It always seemed schizophrenic and amateurish to me.)

But I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised by how well Slackware did in the aforementioned LinuxQuestions poll. I wish the SlackCamp all the best and who knows, maybe I'll give you a visit at least :-)

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 4:11 UTC (Sun) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link] (3 responses)

I'd still recommend giving slackware a try. It's not for everyone, but I think the reputation for being hard is undeserved. The init system is much easier to understand, the text file configuration in general is a world easier than in other distros, since they're all commented nicely and documented. If you can read the fine and short install and configure manuals and understand them, it's no sweat. You really only need to mess with this once, on initial setup, and it's quite straightforward. It ships with a very clean version of KDE, and if you work in the GUI I don't think you'd really need to twiddle anything not accessible from there. Once it's running you even have 'apt' style tools to install and update software these days.

In my experience it tends to run faster and feel 'cleaner' than other distros, as well as being easier to understand so you can fix it if anything goes wrong or needs tweaking. Anyhow... my advice would be to give it a chance, it just might surprise you.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 9:48 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (2 responses)

As I said, for me personally, it's not a question of "giving it a try". I do know how to setup a Linux system configuring text files and I just prefer a good GUI tool. That being said, I do admit many of the GUI tools I've used, including many versions of the mdk software installer 8.x-9.x, were so idiotic or just uggy that they drove me to use command line tools and text files :-) So I understand why many people end up prefering Slackware or something similar. But I still think a good Linux desktop will need GUI config tools, with as much automation as possible, and I'm in search for that desktop.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 20, 2006 11:53 UTC (Mon) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (1 responses)

Have you given Ark Linux a shot ?
http://www.arklinux.org/

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 20, 2006 14:35 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Have you given Ark Linux a shot ?

I haven't, but that does look intriguing. Apparently still a "minor distro", but has a well-known Linux personality behind it. Extra karma (from my viewpoint) of being European.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 18, 2006 23:07 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (4 responses)

What problem is there in using SUSE with KDE? I do it (OpenSUSE 10.0 with KDE 3.4.2) and it works fine enough! I would say that Novell (via SUSE) has a pretty big interest in KDE.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 10:03 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (3 responses)

SUSE is indeed the nr1 choice right now, but I think there are many of us troubled with the direction Novell is going. (Part of the problem being, we can only guess what the direction is...)

I'm hearing rumours that the upcoming version of openSuse will have switched to Gnome being on the top of the list (maybe it's alphabetical?). It would be a natural thing to do, but from my point of view it's a step in the wrong direction, and there might be more steps to come. BTW, can someone confirm this rumour? Or, real soon now, I'll just download a beta myself anyway :-)

(I talk about this when I meet the ceo of Novell Finland, and according to him there is an official policy in Novell to 1) support both desktops, 2) try to converge so that there would not be a difference whether you prefer kde or gnome (i.e. freedesktop.org) and 3) that failing (which I would put my money on) gtk/gnome is their first choice, and this is based on customer surveys. (Which I suspect were conducted in the US by Ximian people, but still, it's a policy and I respect that.))

I often wonder whether Novell knew what they were buying into when they bought both Ximian and SUSE.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 10:41 UTC (Sun) by micampe (guest, #4384) [Link] (1 responses)

3) that failing (which I would put my money on) gtk/gnome is their first choice, and this is based on customer surveys. (Which I suspect were conducted in the US by Ximian people, but still, it's a policy and I respect that.))

No need for conspiracy theories, simply their concept of "customer survey" (and that of others trying to make money from selling distributions) doesn't really involve people just downloading openSUSE, but rather people buying Novell Linux Desktop (or equivalent).

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 19:45 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Yes, I didn't mean it as a conspiracy theory. As I said, it is a decision based on a customer survey, nothing wrong there. But I cannot believe that a majority of current SUSE users - most of whom certainly have paid something for a SUSE cardboardbox, since that was always the way of the SUSE world - would suddenly prefer Gnome after all these years of using the nr 1 KDE distro. So it must mean, that said customer survey would probably have been conducted among US companies, perhaps among Ximian/Novell customers. And there is nothing wrong with that. For instance, it could be that those are Fortune 500 companies and their opinions deserve to be prioritised. But they certainly are not a representative group of SUSE's long time customers.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Apr 2, 2006 17:52 UTC (Sun) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

I'm hearing rumours that the upcoming version of openSuse will have switched to Gnome being on the top of the list (maybe it's alphabetical?).

I'll answer this myself: Gnome is indeed above KDE, but neither is selected. Seems like Novell has found it wises to not prefer either one at this time :-)

On the downside: Without going into expert mode, you cannot pick both KDE and Gnome, which in my view is an unnecessary restriction.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 10:30 UTC (Sun) by micampe (guest, #4384) [Link]

This fact is even more interesting for example in light of recent LinuxQuestions poll (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/1848) KDE is preferred desktop for 65% of us (Gnome is second with 26%). It seems that somewhere somebody is not meeting customer demand...

Whoa! A whole lot of 1932 guys voted on that poll! Linux has definitely arrived on the desktop.

Kubuntu

Posted Mar 20, 2006 15:52 UTC (Mon) by jriddell (subscriber, #3916) [Link] (1 responses)

Kubuntu is perfectly serious and I'm trying to make it the definitive KDE
distro. Give me a poke on #kubuntu on freenode if you have any
comments/complements/problems.

Kubuntu

Posted Mar 21, 2006 10:18 UTC (Tue) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Thanks! Now that I had a name to Google, this article actually answered many of my questions. Had not seen it before.

Too late to... Fork...please!

Posted Mar 20, 2006 18:15 UTC (Mon) by xhosa (guest, #36220) [Link]

hmmm there must be many alternatives. As soon as Mandrake started this
'Club' thing and and started releasing systems without the development
parts ( I think it was 10.0 ) I jumped off the wagon. It was a feeling of
loss not being able to use the distro I was so used to but after a lengthy
search I found my way to Gentoo and I've grown more & more enthusiastic
about the idea of complete control, very good documentation and the very
good 'emerge'-tool used for downloading and upgrading and what not.

Yes there is a downside, it's a _lengthy_ business, setting up you first
system but if you want to have control and quality maybe you have to pay
for it in some ways. Slackware doesn't have pam, kubuntu's tool for
installing new things doesn't give you the same control. Well it's all a
matter of taste. I've used Red Hat, Mandrake, Slackware, Gentoo and
Fedora. Personally, I have no problem to choose. I'll stay w Gentoo. Good
luck finding a new distro :o)

Fork...please!

Posted Mar 18, 2006 22:41 UTC (Sat) by mmacok (guest, #20088) [Link]

I've tried PCLinuxOS (Mandr* fork) and it is my favourite now...

Fork...please!

Posted Mar 19, 2006 10:24 UTC (Sun) by lamikr (subscriber, #2289) [Link] (2 responses)

I am really not sure why there is so much negative hype surrounding Mandriva as the distro itself is working pretty well for me. Things from which I am happy with 3 computers running Mandriva.

- I have server running apache, ssh, subversion, etc and getting frequent updates easily (and free) for security or update fixes.
- I have laptop that boots 2006 from the USB harddrive. I use that a lot for developing stuff for the iPAQ h6300 port and things are working just fine. (http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/HpIpaqH6315)
For some unmystereous reasons other people using other distros have encountered a lot of sychc problems when writing kernel images to MMC card that have prevented h6300 to boot. With mandriva I have seen this very rarely.
- I have one DVB digibox where I mostly run a application called VDR. In the backend I have Mandriva also there and it is working just fine. Actually I just updated this computer to newest cooker dev. branch without problems just by changing the download feeds from 2006 to cooker.
- I tested XGL simply by installing XGL rpms made for the Mandriva. I can easily swich between "normal" and XGL versions of the desktop.

I have also tried to install other distros but I really do not see any big advantages for setting them up.

I think there are things were Mandriva could do a better job.
- One year between stable releases is a little bit too long time. The good thing in that is that 2006.0 is now really ironised out from bugs and there seems to be suprising many "I want to use latest stuff" people who are not willing to run it from the cooker development branch.
- Mandriva has a lot of own "drak" tools for various things like configuring x, network, samba, firewall. Some of them like "firewall" setup tool are a little bit too simple. Maybe it would be better if they would co-operate with more with a gnome/kde for developing better tools for there instead of putting money for the "mandriva" versions from these tools.
- Unlike Suse, fedora, and ubunty etc.. Mandriva was not demonstrating anything in the fosdem 2006.

Fork...please!

Posted Mar 20, 2006 5:02 UTC (Mon) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (1 responses)

What exactly do you mean by 2006 having the bugs removed? That's one of the major problems: 2006 has been abandoned by the developers! It's hardly changed since it was released.

Fork...please!

Posted Mar 20, 2006 8:42 UTC (Mon) by lamikr (subscriber, #2289) [Link]

To quote one of the torwald sayign I remember reading.
"Maybe I am just lucky but is works for me".
Here are the typical things were I use Linux:

- Eclipse with Sun java
- voip with skype
- mplayer/kaffeine/xine plug-ins for showing television news from finish tv channels and divx, dvd:s, etc.
- QEMU for running winxx on top of Linux (This I needed to build myself and was a little bit hackish as QEMU itself needed to be build with gcc 3 (it does not work with gcc 4, but QEMU kernel module needed to be build with gcc 4 as Mandriva kernel is build with that)
- Beep media player for playing music
- Servers like Apache/Subversion/NFS/SSH/Samba/PostgreSQL
- DVD burning
- KPDF for opening pdf files
- Lyx for writing documents
- Openoffice 2 (After downloading it from the OO site, I needed to use OO's font config tool to get nice looking fonts for this one)
- Firewall
- Gnome applets like weather
- VNC
- GIT (I build this myself)
- Monotone (I download src rpm from the cooker, usr rpm --rebuild, and install it to 2006.0)

Anyway, there has happened quite a lot of updates after the release of 2006.0. (And my systems download and installs updates that comes to there automatically in every)
http://anorien.csc.warwick.ac.uk/mirrors/Mandriva/officia...

If you want really get a new applications (instead of bug fixes), then you have four different solutions that sounds just fine for me.
- download the apps from the original site and install it (oo 2 for example)
- download source rpm or real sources and build it yourself (luckily this is usually easy in linux land)
- pay 60 euro to get account to mandriva club which offers prebuild versions from the apps that are newer than the original list of apps included to 2006.0.
- use cooker to get stay in touch with the bleeding edge. (I used to run cooker in my "stable" system for a couple of yers without having bad problems. In there it is ofcourse better to follow the developer mailing list and to submit pug reports or fixes to bugs itself)

Fired, simply fired.

Posted Mar 18, 2006 16:51 UTC (Sat) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link] (1 responses)

I especially liked the bit where he said he planned to sue them for abusive lay-off. I never really used Mandrake, but it's apparent now that I won't be using it again :-)

Jon.

Fired, simply fired.

Posted Mar 19, 2006 15:21 UTC (Sun) by lamikr (subscriber, #2289) [Link]

Firing people is newer fun, but neither is suing people. In Linux land people should be able to handle these issues in some smarter way.

Hopefully you will in future have a change to try both the Mandriva and this Duval's Ulteo. The best thing in Linus is awterwards the possibility have many different choises.

Keep the faith

Posted Mar 18, 2006 21:18 UTC (Sat) by manuel.flury (guest, #7880) [Link]

Keep the faith, just remember Steve Jobs. Manuel Flury