Distrowatch reports that a new beta version of Mandriva Linux 2006 appeared on the mirrors over the weekend. Like the first one a week ago, the new beta release, labelled as 2006 0.1.1, has not yet been officially announced, but the good news is that the mirroring problems we mentioned in last week’s DistroWatch Weekly have been solved and the new release is now available from the usual Mandriva mirror sites. OSDir has a handful of screenshots.
Is it me or is the former DistroWatch page hit giant slowly dying? I looked at the osdir shots (aside: I don’t know how they get so many shots so quickly and serve them so efficiently, excellent job) and it looks pretty good (for a KDE desktop). Did Mandrake/Mandrakelinux/Mandrakesoft/Mandrakeclub/Mandriva finally succeed in killing its community?
I know what you mean, although I wouldn’t descibe it as “dying” – on the contrary, the distro is improving (like most other desktop distributions) with each subsequent release – in relative terms it’s still one of the best desktop distributions out there – having said that, it does seems to have lost alot of “momentum” or “buzz” or “mindshare” in the wider desktop Linux community – it remains to be seen if or how Mandriva decides to address this and whether they can reverse the current trend.
Hello. I am looking for historic Mandrake ISOs (prior to release 7.2) for a reasearch project on the distro’s development history. Is there an FTP server I can find some or all of these old ISOs on?
Thanks.
ftp://mandrake.contactel.cz/Mandrake-old
Seems 7.2 is the oldest avail.
I have some really old ones. Provide an email address where you can be contacted. I am sure that if you ask Mandriva nicely, they may also be willing to help.
Hello. Thank you for your kind offer. Please e.-mail me at
[email protected]]
No real improvement. UI is poor at my advice, no good artwork (desktop, window borders, login, icons). Emacs icon is completly stupid at this place. A lot of problem with mandrake control panel. Network card never up at startup. Constantly switching between eth0 and eth2… Control panel regular crashes. Yes, like a lot of previous mandrake products, not very good. The best about mandriva is the lot of packages avaible with urpmi in binary format. Mandriva could be a very good distro, but like always it seems they have not enough human ressources or organisation to get it.
I have always been a Mandrake fan, but I must say that Mandrake has completely underwhelmed me with the 10.2 release and this current one.
Aesthetically speaking, Mandrake looks dated. In terms of functionality, urpmi is incredible, particularly when compared to the paltry amount of packages available for Suse (yes I am aware of packman’s and a few other sites). Yet I am currently using Suse 9.3 because Yast works much more consistenly and reliably than Mandrake’s Control Center.
Additionally, Suse seems to have a much clearer idea of what a desktop should look like. Suse 9.3’s biggest mistake was using OpenOffice 2.0 which is too buggy for heavy daily use. Going back to 1.1.4 solved that problem.
I hope that once Conectiva’s and Lycoris’s input is gathered, Mandrake will be a much stronger contender, but until then I am unlikely to use it or recommend.
If they do improve, I’ll be back in no time. Mandrake is faster than Suse, has a huge amount of packages and has always made all its software available under a GPL, which is something that I deeply care about.
I suspect quite a lot of people have, like one of the posters, gone to Suse. 10.x may have lots of features. The management centre stuff is great. But stability is not. My clients are now on Suse, and they won’t be coming back.
By the way, I just installed the PPC version of Mandriva 2005, from the downloadable .iso images: well, if there are problems with the x86 version, on PPC there are even more problems! The first one is getting the bootloader to install: this required several attempts, including an upgrade install, which finally fixed things.
Particularly, every time I launch the Mandriva Control Center (both in the 2005 and Cooker-upgraded version), the computer (a Power Mac G4) completely freezes, a few seconds after inserting the root password: maybe hardware-related (there is a Logitech wireless keyboard, for example)?
Mandriva is a potentially very good distro (it was the first one I tried, also, on x86) – but there still are some big bugs, especially on the separately mantained PPC version.
I agree that SuSE, at least currently, has the competitive edge, on x86…
A lot of people have gone to Suse and Ubuntu imho. Given the packaging community there was behing mandrake at some point they should have concentrated on getting the basics 99.9% right. They were the cutting edge at some point but seem to have lost interest.
Pretty sure they are now concentrating on making their corporate offering more credible cause that’s where the money is in the medium term.
I don’t know about the rest but the day I started losing interest on Mandrake was when they got out of phase with the releases of KDE…and then, the largely rejected name change, of course. Yeah I know that a name is just a name but you won’t see Suse being renamed Susell just because they were bought by Novell.
Well, sometimes you can’t win.
Lots of people whined and complained about MDK not being stable enough and always releasing bleeding edge software. So they decided to take a more conservative approach and now they are derided for doing that too.
MDK needs to improve the presentation layer of its software, but I have had a server on MDK 10.1 and it has never been down.
Well, sometimes you can’t win.
Lots of people whined and complained about MDK not being stable enough and always releasing bleeding edge software. So they decided to take a more conservative approach and now they are derided for doing that too.
Yep you got a point…I was talking more on the point-of-view of a typical “geek”, which is probably not the market Mandriva is aiming at right now .
I’ve seen a lot of people jumping out of Mandriva to Ubuntu/Kubuntu but I hope Mandriva is still doing fine financially.
The name change was an elegant way to settle the legal dispute with Hearst about the “Mandrake” name.
And Mandriva may not be bundling the 0-day latest releases of KDE/GNOME etc. by default at the moment, but they are providing a version with updated KDE to Mandriva Club members, and there’s a separate repository with cutting edge GNOME packages as well.
I don’t understand why people complain about the look…it’s fully customizable….
Actually, they could have improved it with a nicer widget style ( the windows style is elegant and original), a better color set (like suse one), and a nicer set of wallpapers ( suse 9.3’s one is fabulous).
The distro is a bit unstable because they are doing too much customization in the back-end part.
You can have the latest packages from Cooker wich is sometize more stable than stable.
URPMI is better than apt.
Mandrake control center is simple and faster than Yast. The programs are well organized. They have menudrake which is useful for Gnome users and make interopability better between major DEs.
There are more packages than Ubuntu in Contrib+PLF
It’s fast, easy to customize.
The community is great ( I am talking of Bugzilla, mailing lists, i18nation )
I tested Ubuntu for a long time, it’s bad, hard to configure for newbies, has old packages.