Submitted by Gael Duval, creator of Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva Linux), has been fired from the company. The information leaked on the Mandriva forums, and Duval later confirmed it on his own webpage. He says: “Since the information has leaked, I will post a message in the next few days on this website about why this is the end of the Mandriva story for me, and what’s next.” Since Mandrake was for many the first distribution they ever tried, I think it is only fair to thank him for creating Mandrake, and to wish him the best of luck in any following endeavours.
Wow, Don’t you just love how publicly traded companies can dump their founder in the belief that they will be better off? HA HA HA.
Well, no doubt Apple screwed up getting rid of him, but the fact is back in the day, Jobs was insufferable, almost impossible to work with. Many, many Apple employees tell horror stories of him. Still, must have been a nasty plate of crow asking him to come back.
Yes, but then again, many great things came from his being fired, and then his reacquisition. Love live King Jobs!
Well, no doubt Apple screwed up getting rid of him, but the fact is back in the day, Jobs was insufferable, almost impossible to work with. Many, many Apple employees tell horror stories of him. Still, must have been a nasty plate of crow asking him to come back.
Uhhh…they never asked him to come back. They bought out his company.
Before anyone jumps to conclusions, let’s wait and see. Gael Duval may be leaving Mandriva, but we don’t know why yet.
The company is certainly in a big transition. I would suggest that one of the main reasons for this is the rise of Ubuntu. Before Ubuntu, Mandriva (Mandrake) was the king of easy GNU/Linux. That situation has totally changed, and the release of Ubuntu Dapper Drake (enterprise ready) will really shake the entire Mandriva marketplace.
Personally I don’t think it has anything to do with the rise of Ubuntu. Mandriva had serious problems before Ubuntu and the quality of its releases has been gradually going down since the 8.x releases. Initially I thought it was due to financial difficulties and supported them all the way through their banruptcy protection. Anyway the releases are still not up to par with the likes of Suse.
I couldn’t agree more.
Mandriva was at it’s peak around version 8, I started using it with version 8.2 and I loved it. Since then it has declined terribly. Here are some examples:
– QA went down the drain, since version 8 I’ve encoutered more bug like behaviour. It’s not bad on the surface level but when you start playing with the more powerful features and programs in KDE you somtimes just find the bugs crippling.
– Three or more clicks are now required to start applications burried under “More Applications” category, most user interface guidelines say three is the limit and even Windows adheres to that most of the time.
– Mandriva has it’s own menu system, I tried building RPMs for it but couldn’t get the icons added to the menu system. I used Mandriva’s own documentation and even asked people who said they were developers for Mandriva and I still couldn’t figure out a way to get the menu icon to appear in the menu (and yes I did try the kdedesktop2mdkmenu.pl script, although it’s been a while so I might not be remembering the name correctly).
– Mandriva needs to try sticking with some standards rather than making their own, see my former point for just one example.
– As stated above about standards, Mandriva felt compelled to experiment with their own login manager which both an eyesore and full of bugs. I stopped using it so I don’t know if they’ve finally decided on using GDM or if they simply themed their own login manager to look like GDM and worked out enough bugs to make it usable.
– The Galaxy theme is liked by some and loathed by many more. They should just have used a nicer theme that was already available. KDE and Gnome apps don’t have to look the same, with the button ordering different and KDE applications starting slower outside of KDE you’ve lost transparency anyway.
– Redundancy confuses users. Either choose apt or urpmi, but not both! And why two nearly identical tools anyway? That’s simply bloat.
– The Mandriva Club while a nice option for those who can afford it and have a convenient method of payment isn’t something a poor student like myself can afford, nor is it something I can easily purchase or renew at a local store. Mandriva should open up the package repository they keep exclusive to their club members so everyone can have access. Club members will still get ample special treatment with their early access, free ISO downloads of the pay-for versions and their exclusive forums.
– Mandriva needs to lighten their distro, get rid of redundant applications.
– Mandriva absolutely must stop cramming GTK applications into KDE, for example that GTK media player is the default under KDE in Mandriva. KDE has it’s own media players which are just as capable as the GTK ones, KDE also has it’s own web browser which albeit doesn’t render as well as FireFox but still fits better into KDE. Rather than making these GTK apps defaults either leave the KDE applications as the defaults or ask the user after they log in for the first time.
Some people don’t mind Mandriva the way it is and that’s fine, some people will hate me for saying these things and that’s fine too. There are also several people who feel the same way as I do and for us Mandriva’s last few releases were absolutely intolerable.
Most of what Celerate mentions as “bugs” are really just personal opinions about asthetics. So he/she does not like the Mandrake display manager, or the Galaxy theme, or the menu organization. Those are not bugs in any way, shape or form. There just preferences.
And quite frankly, Mandriva has made some really nice design choices, and presents a really nice looking, easy to use distro with lots of great gui config tools.
That said, since getting into Mandriva I’ve moved on to Debian and derivatives (Kanotix, Knoppix, Ubuntu). I love the apt system and the massive Deb repos, and the way the overall system is put together. However, Debian and most of it’s derivatives could learn a lot from Mandriva about packaging a distro, and featuring a great installer, and great GUI config tools.
In fact, an awesome hypothetical distro would be a Debian Sid based distro, like Kanotix, which features the Mandriva installer, and the Mandriva Control Center, and maybe even the Galaxy theme as an option.
PCLinuxOS tries to do similar stuff, but it’s not Debian based, and I found it to be quite buggy and heavy on memory. Otherwise it’s a nice distro.
It’s too bad Gael Duval got canned, since he seemed to be the original inspiration behind the project. Oh well.
“Most of what Celerate mentions as “bugs” are really just personal opinions about asthetics. So he/she does not like the Mandrake display manager, or the Galaxy theme, or the menu organization. Those are not bugs in any way, shape or form. There just preferences. “
I didn’t say they were all bugs, you’re misunderstanding. In one sentence I said that Mandriva was getting more and more bugs since version 8 which is completely true, and then in new sentences I mentioned some bad design issues they also made as well as bugs.
“no bugs in any way, shape or form.”
That’s absolutely wrong. The Mandriva login manager (mdkdm) for example had a very commonly reoccuring problem where the buttons wouldn’t work and neither would keyboard shortcuts. The KDE desktop while seeming to be stable enough on the surface would often be broken when you tried to use more advanced features such as the exporting a folder full of images in Konqueror as an image gallery. There were several other bugs depending on the version, especially in the way Mandriva delt with different kinds of removable media (CDs included), but then when people want to believe a product is good they often overlook those, work around them and even forget they’re there. These bugs wouldn’t be very apparent to non-technical users, but for most power users and developers they were apparent if not obvious.
“And quite frankly, Mandriva has made some really nice design choices, and presents a really nice looking, easy to use distro with lots of great gui config tools. “
I agree, they have made some good design choices; however, after version 8 they also made several bad design choices. Of course you don’t have to agree, but you can’t say I’m wrong either because it’s subjective.
“That said, since getting into Mandriva I’ve moved on to Debian and derivatives (Kanotix, Knoppix, Ubuntu). I love the apt system and the massive Deb repos, and the way the overall system is put together. However, Debian and most of it’s derivatives could learn a lot from Mandriva about packaging a distro, and featuring a great installer, and great GUI config tools. “
I noticed you didn’t mention the menu as one of the things you’d like to have brought over to your hypothetical Debian based distribution. Can I assume then that you don’t like it either?
“PCLinuxOS tries to do similar stuff, but it’s not Debian based, and I found it to be quite buggy and heavy on memory. Otherwise it’s a nice distro. “
PCLinuxOS is just Mandriva with some custom packages.
“It’s too bad Gael Duval got canned, since he seemed to be the original inspiration behind the project. Oh well.”
I’m sympathetic to Gael Duval, he founded Mandriva he shouldn’t just be dismissed like that. Hopefully he’s kept some stock in the company, he should at least still make an income from it. I wonder who the stock holders will replace him with, and what the future might hold for Mandriva.
We don’t actually have ‘our own’ menu system. We use Debian’s, because we had a similar goal to Debian – make the menus consistent across all desktops. Odd how I never read complaints about Debian’s menus, but maybe I’m just not looking in the right places. Until XDG, there was no standard way to achieve this. MDV 2007 will most likely dump the Debian menu system and use XDG menus natively with some sort of compatibility layer for the remaining desktops / WMs that don’t support it.
mdkkdm isn’t used any more, we use the latest stock kdm with a custom theme.
KDE and GNOME apps don’t ‘have’ to look the same, but users sure appreciate it. It’s very important to MDV since the default desktop (and the most used by MDV users) is KDE, but the MDV configuration tools are written in GTK+.
We don’t support apt _at all_, it’s in contrib and there’s no official apt-format MDV repositories. If you want to use apt on Mandriva, fine, but you’re on your own. smart was somewhat supported for 2006, but now the smart author left MDV (this was a while ago, he wasn’t laid off), it’s not so much a priority, we will keep on with urpmi in future.
Club forums are not actually exclusive to Club members, non-members can read all the forums and post to one forum. Club members are generally of the opinion that they’d prefer more benefits, not fewer. The package repositories exclusive to Club members mostly just contain the commercial software from the paid-for editions of Mandriva – the only non-commercial software that’s exclusive to the Club ATM is GNOME 2.12 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 final.
Why would we want to get rid of redundant applications? People accuse the larger distros of ‘bloat’ all the time without ever explaining exactly what is the _problem_ with packaging multiple apps. They’re only ever packaged in the first place because someone WANTS to use them, we’re not going to waste time packaging apps no-one wants. Some people like emacs, some like vi. Some like KDE, some like GNOME. As long as the default installation is fairly streamlined – and it is, and of course, with Mandriva One it’s even _more_ so – what’s the possible harm in having lots of extra apps packaged for those users who choose to use them? What do we gain by ditching those packages and making those who use them unhappy?
“We don’t actually have ‘our own’ menu system. We use Debian’s, because we had a similar goal to Debian – make the menus consistent across all desktops. Odd how I never read complaints about Debian’s menus, but maybe I’m just not looking in the right places. Until XDG, there was no standard way to achieve this. MDV 2007 will most likely dump the Debian menu system and use XDG menus natively with some sort of compatibility layer for the remaining desktops / WMs that don’t support it. “
I’ve never built packages for Debian, but I found it very frustrating that no one could tell me how to make working desktop icons for Mandriva in my RPMs. The layout of the Mandriva menus also require more than three clicks in some areas because of that “More Applications” category which really shouldn’t be there IMO. Of course I’m not here to give Mandriva fans and developers a hard time, I’m just trying to offer my input.
“We don’t support apt _at all_, it’s in contrib and there’s no official apt-format MDV repositories. If you want to use apt on Mandriva, fine, but you’re on your own. smart was somewhat supported for 2006, but now the smart author left MDV (this was a while ago, he wasn’t laid off), it’s not so much a priority, we will keep on with urpmi in future.”
I was mislead :-p , it was my understanding that Mandriva was going to be supporting and using both.
“Club forums are not actually exclusive to Club members, non-members can read all the forums and post to one forum. Club members are generally of the opinion that they’d prefer more benefits, not fewer. The package repositories exclusive to Club members mostly just contain the commercial software from the paid-for editions of Mandriva – the only non-commercial software that’s exclusive to the Club ATM is GNOME 2.12 and OpenOffice.org 2.0 final.”
So if I buy a boxed set instead of joining the club I’m not missing out?
“Why would we want to get rid of redundant applications?”
Ok, that’s a fair question. In some cases it’s good, but as an example do you think people need KEdit, KWrite and Kate? The one that bothers me the most though is the inclusion of so many unnecessary GTK apps in what I expect to be a KDE only installation. Adobe Acrobat isn’t necessary because of KGhostView, Totem isn’t necessary because of Kaffeine, RhythmBox isn’t necessary because of Juk and AmaroK, RealPlayer isn’t necessary nor desired by most. Why are those defaults?
“People accuse the larger distros of ‘bloat’ all the time without ever explaining exactly what is the _problem_ with packaging multiple apps.”
You’re right, I did jump to that conclusion prematurely.
“They’re only ever packaged in the first place because someone WANTS to use them, we’re not going to waste time packaging apps no-one wants. Some people like emacs, some like vi. Some like KDE, some like GNOME.”
As a KDE user I’d consider one of those redundant applications to be Totem which for some reason is included even on KDE only installations and further more IIRC is set as the default. Is that one really necessary instead of kaffeine?
“As long as the default installation is fairly streamlined – and it is, and of course, with Mandriva One it’s even _more_ so – what’s the possible harm in having lots of extra apps packaged for those users who choose to use them?”
I can appreciate choice as much as the next person, but when I choose a KDE only installation and find half a dozen or more redundant GTK applications in there set as defaults it dawns on me that I could find a distribution that cares more about me as a KDE user.
“What do we gain by ditching those packages and making those who use them unhappy?”
What Lycoris had before Mandriva bought them, a clean desktop where all the applications in KDE are KDE/Qt apps. I don’t see too many Gnome users getting Kaffeine as their default media player.
I’m glad to have gotten a reply from someone involved with Mandriva. I don’t suppose I could get some sort of comments about bugs I’ve found with version 2006:
– Before I replaced Mandriva on my dad’s computer the Gimp would crash when instructed to open any image file.
– Adobe Acrobat although installed and set as the default PDF viewer (shouldn’t be in KDE when there’s KGhostView) wouldn’t start.
– Whether or not removable USB drives and card readers would work was almost a matter of planetary alignment.
– I found software in the KDEaddon packages not to have been tested enough, frequently they would include addons which wouldn’t work or would crash.
That said I did get into Linux because of Mandrake, and I’m glad it was there for me. But I’m sad now that it’s just not working for me any more. I don’t know what happened, but I find the new design to be aggravating and the support for usb peripherals to have even more aggravating bugs even though they should be supported. I can’t be the only one to experience these problems, other people I’ve introduced to Linux by giving them Mandrake CD’s have also switched because Mandriva’s latest releases have been less than satisfactory for them too.
People accuse the larger distros of ‘bloat’ all the time without ever explaining exactly what is the _problem_ with packaging multiple apps.
IMHO bloat can be defined as having multiple apps installed for the same task by default. Choice on the other hand is the ability to install your favourites easily at or after install time.
As long as the default installation is fairly streamlined – and it is, and of course, with Mandriva One it’s even _more_ so – what’s the possible harm in having lots of extra apps packaged for those users who choose to use them?
None whatsoever, but IIRC Mandriva’s default setup is still fairly bloated. Hell, Discovery has something like 3 CDs. Lycoris (of old), ASPLinux 11, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xandros and Linspire all have (had in Lycoris’ case) desktops brimming with functionality after an installation from one CD. If they can do it, so can Mandriva. Hopefully Mandriva One will be the first step in this direction.
Also, there is nothing like Click-n-Run to make it easy for newbies to install packages (though I know Drak-n-Go – http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/Drakngo/ – is in the works).
What do we gain by ditching those packages and making those who use them unhappy?
What Lycoris had before Mandriva bought them, a clean desktop where all the applications in KDE are KDE/Qt apps. I don’t see too many Gnome users getting Kaffeine as their default media player.
Exactly. KDE has perfectly good applications for most tasks – just as Gnome does. Only poor engineering and QA keeps Mandriva from having sane defaults for both profiles. SUSE certainly does, and it works well.
Edited 2006-03-15 07:28
Ubuntu has to prove itself in the enterprise market before you can say it is the cause of the problem. Perhaps over time you can make this claim. I find that Red Hat has developed the best business model for the enterprise companies. My guess is that Mandriva wants to move in a new, profitable direction. I guess Gael can’t/won’t take them there.
Maybe I’m tired of the Ubuntu buzz, or maybe I’m just tired of the prevelent Mandriva-bashing, but as someone who has run many distros, including both Ubuntu and Mandriva, I don’t see why Ubuntu is such a big shaker. Mandriva still has the _much_ better installer. It’s just as easy to upgrade packages (apt-get vs. urpmi). Mandriva provides many more graphical configuration tools for things like video settings, xorg configurations, etc.
Ubuntu is not damaging Mandriva on the features/functionality front. It is simply winning the marketing game. Linux users are an interesting crowd to try and win over. What will put of more users is Mandriva’s really-annoying Club system. I can’t get update notifications to my desktop because I’m not in the club. So I have to go find my own mirrors, and replace them as the mirrors go down. That’s enough to lose a lot of loyal Linux users: we like free to mean free.
“Ubuntu is not damaging Mandriva on the features/functionality front. It is simply winning the marketing game. Linux users are an interesting crowd to try and win over. What will put of more users is Mandriva’s really-annoying Club system. I can’t get update notifications to my desktop because I’m not in the club. So I have to go find my own mirrors, and replace them as the mirrors go down. That’s enough to lose a lot of loyal Linux users: we like free to mean free.”
Heh. It’s kind of funny how you suggest that Ubuntu has no advantages except for “marketing” and then demonstrate one of the best features of Ubuntu: that it has totally free update notifications with no need to hunt for unofficial mirrors, and no stupid club that you have to join (and no pestering to give them money). I’d call that a feature, no?
You don’t have to be in the Club to get update notifications: it’s a separate service called Mandriva Online, which costs $20 per year. Club members get Online free as part of their subscription. I’m sure it’s lovely to be a distro with a gigantic slush fund and no commercial imperatives who can provide update notification services for free, but we have to make money _somewhere_. You don’t have to pay to get updates, and there’s no special paid-for update mirrors, Online is purely a notification service that uses MandrivaUpdate to actually _install_ the updates.
I can’t take it any more.
-Mandriva is doing poorly…
………It must be because Uubuntu is so successful
-OSX isn’t gaining market share like it should…
………It must be because Ubuntu is so successful
-MS is competing on features…
………It must be because Ubuntu is so successful
-The ozone hole is getting smaller…
………It must be because Ubuntu is so successful
Stop already, it’s not all because Ubuntu is so successful.
They can’t stop going on about it…
…It must be because Ubuntu is so successful.
UBUNTU what !, I love when people try to shove their agenda in anything. I still consider Mandrake as the aesthetically pleasing desktop with good installer. The decsion to remove Gael Duval maybe infact good for the company, A founder of a company can not be a good Businessman essentially.
A founder of a company can not be a good Businessman essentially.
Bill Gates.
My first attempt at learning this thing called “Linux” was installing Mandrake Linux 7.1 on my Pentinum II machine. I had all kinds of problems with drivers (I have to load it into the kernel, what the heck does that mean anyway
, but I loved it from the start. Thanks again for starting me down the road of Linux and OpenSource in general!
I share your feelings, and I believe many of us do.
I also do! Even though Mandriva is no longer my personal choice for a distro, it (well, Mandrake) was my first successful attempt with Linux. I’m using Linux since then and I am very happy with it. I often recommend it to beginners.
So thanks a lot to Gael Duval for his work and I wish him the best for his future projects
I share ur feelings as well. I started off Linux with Mandrake 7.2.
I have since moved onto the Gentoo crowded – then again, if I didn’t start out with Mandrake at the time I would have never taken up Linux at all.
Mandrake (not Mandriva!) was my fourth distro. I started on Red Hat, moved to Slackware, but because I was too stupid back then, and couldn’t figure it out, I went to SuSE, then to Mandrake. I eventually made my way back to Slackware, but only as a second OS. My primary distros are Debian (stable, on my server) or Debian-based (Ubuntu, to be exact) on my desktop systems.
I do have to thank Gael for Mandrake. It made it much easier to get my wife off of Windows, and over to Linux (now she runs a Mac though).
I too started with Mandrake, Mandrake 9.0 to be specific.
Mandrake was excellent for learning to know Linux. I’ve since moved to Suse, but I’m still grateful for all the knowledge I’ve gotten by using Mandrake!
Mandrake (now Mandriva) had a ton of problems when they bought Lycoris and the whole contraversy regarding them not wanting to release source code of some components from Lycoris Desktop/LX
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/8291
Even though this was later clarified, it was horrible pr:
http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/46843/index.html
Also, Mandriva hasn’t been doing as well as they hoped against rivals like SuSE and Redhat in any market other than maybe France. The stock prices don’t lie:
https://us.etrade.com/e/t/invest/quotesresearch?sym=MDKFF"e_type…
https://us.etrade.com/e/t/invest/quotesresearch?sym=RHAT"e_type=…
Mandriva was the only one targetting home users, and this market is much more difficult than the business one. In the home maket, products follow trends, and Mandriva couldn’t resist this stupid habit users have.
Anyway, I wish the best to you Gaël, and I will surely follow you in your next project.
So long, and thanks for all the fish. Hope you get involved with another distribution project – you have brilliant ideas. Ubuntu would love ya
i also start my never ending linux journey back in 99 with 5.4 “better redhat than redhat” and finally gave up in 10.1 due rpm dependency hell … still hope mandriva will face kinda same happy end story as apple/jobs did .. and i dont think about ipods
Mandriva pioneered many of the technologies that we now take for granted, but many of the kids in this forum appear to be too young to remember.
CUPS, yeap, they were the first to ship it. A journaled file system, first guys on the block that used it. A decent installer with the best partition tool in any currently shipping operating system, yes that’s Mandriva’s own legacy.
I have never understood why so many people have this animadversion to Mandriva, when it has always kept all of its tools under the GPL, always has had free ISOs, and focused on bringing linux to the average person since day one.
I still have a Mandrake 9.1 server in the closet at home and it keeps on ticking. I plan to upgrade it sometime, but since it’s behind a firewall and it does what it needs to do, I haven’t gotten around to it.
Thanks Mandriva and thanks Gael. Best of luck.
Mandriva pioneered many of the technologies that we now take for granted, but many of the kids in this forum appear to be too young to remember.
However time has passed and nowdays everybody implements those things, and sometimes they do it better.
So.. if Mandrake was innovative this does not imply Mandriva today is still rocking.
Mandriva today is a different beast than old Mandrake.
I personally tried all mandriva and mandrake distros, and conluded that except for mandirva 2006 all previous distros are quite unstable. I might be picky, but the best distros I have ever tested were RHEL 4.3 (Redhat Enterprise Linux 4.3 AS) and SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server 9.x). these two OSs are extremely stable OSs, so they are OK for server and demanding workstation works; but if you are not so critical about stability, mandriva 2006 is an excellent choice even above ubuntu which seems less polished; Unfortunately I cannot recommend SUSE 10 as it’s extremely unstable.
One thing I noticed, if you want to compile firefox 1.5.0.1 on mandriva 2006( because its not available as an installable package) then you will encounter errors just releated to mandriva, while on RHEL and SLES you will never encounter any of such problems.
I also tried to install many other packages through compiling and I discovered the previous problem is reproducable.
Anyway, I always wish the best for all linux distros.
Google easy urpmi and you won’t have to do much compiling at all.
And compiling firefox isn’t exactly simple, so I am not surprised it failed. But anyway, why would you compile when you could have just downloaded it straight from mozilla.com?
out of curiousity what do you find unstable about suse 10? I know its off topic,, im just curious.
Hmm, after cutting what would be considered “the fat” out of the company, I would be interested to hear if Joe Cheek is still with Mandriva or not? Not that I consider Joe “fat”, I believe his position was tenious at best. I’m still not sure why the whole Lycoris deal happened to begin with, on the surface it’s wasn’t the smartest deal for any one involved IMO.
As I understand it, Joe left around the end of last year (there was never any internal or external announcement, though, that’s just from a few things around the web I noticed).
i feel for Gael but in a way the writing was on the wall, ubuntu is just doinga lot better than mandriva/mandrake ever has done, but i hope an do wish the best of luck for him in the future,
Competition is good!! Ubuntu coming along and forcing MANY issues in the Linux world is a good thing! All of these are signs that our little Tux is finally growing up and becoming an important fixture on the corporate environment. Like it or not, Linux is finally here to stay . . . there is no going back now! That’s the good news.
The bad news? All of you who have been at the top of the Linux heap for a number of years due to being early adapters, now you’re going to have to work hard at staying there. That’s right, you’ve been working hard for years now, forging and blazing new trails and markets, and now due to your own success, you have to fight just to stay in business. That’s right, those little kids who grew up on your software, knowing everything about every little piece of code you’ve ever written, are now your competition, with code built upon yours..
Not do you only have to worry about the young “up and comers” but now you have to worry about well funded corporate interest. Read the news lately? It seems like just about any open source project with high visibility and community numbers is getting purchased by corporations looking to make their mark in open source.
So Mandriva, don’t blame the competition, you created it. Instead, continue to be innovative and ground breaking. Continue to blaze your own trail and keep your community happy. And never, never, forget where you came from . . . I think this would be your biggest downfall.
If you’re referring to my comment, I ain’t ‘blaming’ anyone. I’m just explaining that the reason update notification isn’t free on Mandriva (at least, not officially, I know many users who just do the same stuff Online does with a few shell scripts) is that we have to produce some kind of revenue somewhere in order to keep the product and the company a going concern.
Not to any particular comment Adam, just a general tone I’ve been hearing lately including the interview with François, so truthfly less you than any of the above. 🙂
When I read the comments for Mandriva’s CEO interview I thought there were some unfriendly comments between him and Duval:
http://club.mandriva.com/xwiki/bin/Main/interview-francois0602
I’m not surprised he’s gone. I don’t think this is good for Mandriva.
That whole section was what is technically referred to in the business as a ‘joke’…as was explained in the comments, just in case it wasn’t blindingly obvious in the first place (I thought it was). The point of the paragraph is to humorously explain that one of Francois’ main roles is to try and reconcile the ideal thing for engineering with the ideal thing for the community with the ideal thing for corporate customers with the ideal thing for the finance department, etc etc etc…
Was becoming a publicly traded company too quickly. They then had some serious digressions (Education anyone) which hurt their focus. Peopl usually slate Redhat for their decisions, but the decisions they made got them to be undisputed number 1 in the Linux market place.
Its all very well to be the most loved desktop distro, but its called free software for a reason. Don’t expect people to pay for the software. (Yes I know its free as in freedom).
Its sad though to see the founder being forced out, but that is how capitalism, more specifically, publicly traded companies operate. There is no place for sentiment, and as a business leader, Duval failed.
Well, let’s do some testing, I keep 2006 in a VMware for this…
Running a stock install of 2006 Club edition with all current updates:
double-clicking an .ogg file opens Amarok
double-clicking a .avi file opens Kaffeine
double-clicking a .pdf in Konqueror opens it within Konq – not sure what’s being embedded, I’m not a KDE expert, but from the right-click menu it appears Acrobat is the default. Personally I agree that it’d be nicer to use kghostview / evince, but Acrobat seems remarkably popular with users, so I’m not so sure the majority is with us on that one. I can’t reproduce the bug with Acrobat not starting in my VM, but it does happen on my main machine, and I know why; Acrobat is incompatible with SCIM, the default input method for CJK on Mandriva. If you have Chinese, Japanese or Korean localisation installed, you’re probably suffering from the same problem, I can tell you how to fix it if you want to know. If not, I don’t know what the problem is.
I can’t reproduce the GIMP bug – it works fine.
Removable USB devices also appear to be handled fine. We do this in the standardised way, now, anyway – it’s all handled by udev, hal and gnome-volume-manager (in 2006, 2007 will use KDE’s volume manager in KDE, now it actually has one). So it’d be surprising if there were any Mandriva-specific bugs. I do agree there were problems back when we used supermount (and to a lesser extent when we used magicdev), and there was that annoying issue in 10.1 where it wouldn’t automount USB devices which weren’t properly formatted (many USB keys aren’t, and most OSes / distros handle this), but those have gone since MDV 2005. If you’re really having problems in 2006, you’ll have to file a bug with some specific details so the developers can look at the problem.
kedit does not appear to be installed by default – I see only kate and kwrite on my ‘editors’ menu. As I said I’m not a KDE expert, but I believe these are intended to fulfil different purposes, a bit like Wordpad and Notepad, but it may be possible to reduce it to just one – there has been some discussion on this topic on the Cooker mailing list lately. I certainly think we’d get complaints if we entirely stopped packaging either one or the other, but only installing one by default may be a good idea.
If you buy a box set then yes, you aren’t missing a lot by not joining the Club, in terms of software available; as I said, just the Club packages of GNOME 2.12 and OO.o 2.0 final. Oh, I think Firefox 1.5 is in there too, but you can get that from many other places (mozilla.org, seerofsouls…)
The menu layout’s not perfect and we acknowledge that (and always welcome ideas / mockups for better ones). However, it’s the best effort I’ve seen at fulfilling our goal, which is that every installed GUI-based app should be represented on the menu. You simply can’t manage that, for a 15,000+ package distro, in two menu levels – it’s not enough room. You can always switch to native KDE / GNOME menus in menudrake if you’d rather have a simpler layout at the cost of not _every_ app being represented.
david: Discovery is really only two CDs – the third CD included in the box is a live CD. If it didn’t support dozens of languages, it would fit on one CD (see Mandriva One – it’s only one CD, but we had to do four ‘editions’ of that one CD to cover all the languages we support).
mkone: actually, your post represents a common misconception (see all the ‘Steve Jobs’ comparisions) – Gael wasn’t running the company and he hadn’t been for quite some time.
sorry, I just remembered, 2006 club edition installs GNOME by default and I mostly installed the VM to test KDE, so it wasn’t quite stock packages – I deselected GNOME and selected KDE. You may be right about the default apps so far as 2006 powerpack / free go; I don’t have those installed atm so I can’t test right now, but I’ll try and check it out when I can; ignore what I wrote above about amarok / kaffeine for now. sorry.
First off, I’m glad that there are companies out there that are working hard to make Linux distros for the desktop that are both easy to use and powerful. Gael had a lot to do with that and he deserves our thanks.
Mandriva is one of the first distros I ever used. Many years later there are many more distros now but I haven’t switched because Mandriva does everything I need. Some comments earlier suggested that Mandriva needs to get rid of some packages because there are too many. This is what I like about Mandriva – The fact that if I want to try out new software I can almost always find an RPM in the repository. End users should have the option of compiling any version of the software they choose but should never be *forced* to co mpile software or go without.
That said, Mandriva does have a problem with so many packages in their repository: they don’t always have the resources to update packages like they should. For example, Anjuta2 had a serious bug that the authors fixed 7 months ago and it *still* hasn’t been fixed in the Mandriva RPMs. Bugzilla: http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=18124
Mandriva has some issues but all things considered its one the best (if not the best) distro out there.