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Gaël Duval on Mandrake, GNU/Linux in 2005 49

Posted by timothy from the look-out-it's-manbat dept.
uninet writes "To catch up on what's new since our last full interview, Mandrakesoft co-founder Gaël Duval recently agreed to talk with me about where the company is heading and other interesting IT current events, such as the Linux Core Consortium and Apple's Mac mini. You can read the new interview on OFB.biz."
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Gaël Duval on Mandrake, GNU/Linux in 2005 More

Gaël Duval on Mandrake, GNU/Linux in 2005

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  • FP? (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by vettemph ( 540399 )
    First post an hour after the article was posted?
    c'mon guys, what's up with that?
    • Maybe everyone is busy redownloading the third stream of updates in 3 days to fix the fact that they broke the KDE RPMs when they released them the first time.

      They have a pretty polished distro that is easy for the average n00b to install, but they have fscked up a couple of times, with the KDE updates and also clamav (updated 3 times in as many days because the upgrades broke more than they fixed).
      • The problem is that urpmi is a good rpm manager but it is not 100% moron proof. Furthermore it does not include a "dist-upgrade" feature wich can prevent a user eho want to upgrade his installation from doing some stupid errors. I think that more efforts should be spended in improving apt and apt4rpm (which is already fully functional for Fedora and SuSE) instead of creating (a bit) lower quality tool such as urpmi and Yum.
        • It's not URPMI that's the problem. Urpmi does a pretty good job at the end of the day. It manages the repositories of files and downloads what it needs to fix dependencies.

          The problem with the latest batch of upgrades was kdebase was broken and kbebase-nsplugins was renamed as a part of the upgrade. On top of that, the nsplugins package depended on itself, so you couldn't install it with urpmi unless it was already installed...

          And there was a problem with clamav (I don't use it so i didn't read the adv

    • Re:FP? (Score:2, Informative)

      by loddington ( 263358 )
      Most people dont have the distro news turned on by default. You would suprised how much of slashdot you miss using the standard slashdot filters.

      As for Firefox and thunderbird you can get them from mandrakeclub.

      • Actualy, both Thunderbird and Mozilla-Firefox are available for free from the "contrib" media, available on all free (as in beer) mirrors.

        No ned to join MandrakeClub to get those packages. Although it is nice to be part of MAndrakeClub

        Peace.
    • Can't help it. Mandrake is like a dying distro. It reminds me of RIP Turbolinux. Sure the company can fill the big void left by the lousy Redhat fedora.

      • Is that a US centric view? We all know that RH is the top US brand but Mandrake has been the TOP World brand for a very long time. Have a look at distrowatch.com. See the page ranking half way down on the left column. Look at all the data span options. Mandrake has loads of packages and if you attach to the PLF repository you'll get all the packages that mandrake doesn't include for image/legal reasons. (P2P, stronger encryption, special DVD tools...)

        PS Ubuntu has taken #1 in the last month by a small marg
      • >>left column
        Make that the right column, sorry. :)
        (ambidextrous, I always get them mixed up.)
        • Are u kidding me. You are using a website page hit as a metric to see if anyone uses mandrake. They could have downloaded it anywhere. There is no way to really measure whether some kid's bedroom secondary PC is running mandrake or redhat.

          • Fine. But I'm curious:

            1) What marketing segment and region were you refering to.

            2) What are your references?
  • GD: [snip] Now the question is: what's the cost of the Mac Mini without MacOS?
    Seriously, this is Apple traditional (and excellent) marketing and communication.

    • Re:cracking on the mac mini... heh (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SpottedKuh ( 855161 ) on Monday January 31, 2005 @11:46PM (#11536733)
      Gaël Duval makes the somewhat "interesting" assumption that everyone who buys a desktop computer wants to run Linux on it:

      OFB: Is [the Mac Mini] a threat to GNU/Linux on the desktop?
      GD: Not really since the Mac Mini is very likely to run Linux.

      I think the question OFB was really asking was: Will the inexpensive Mac Mini cause people to choose OS X as a desktop UNIX solution instead of Linux. And while Linux is a fine desktop solution, the simple truth is that if people are willing to spend over $2000 to buy a Powerbook for the sole sake of running OS X, they're probably willing to spend under $500 to have an OS X desktop too.
  • RedHat/Fedora, Debian, SuSE, and Slackware are the most well known distros. And Mandrake? Most distros are ripoffs of the first 4. Mandrake is RedHat based. Gentoo is one of the few of the relatively new distros that is really different. Knoppix, too, is more than "just a Debian ripoff". I'm not criticizing them for copying. Just that what's the advantage of using a RedHat based distro when you can just use RedHat? Easy to think of one disadvantage-- you have to switch or live with obsolescence if t
    • 1) The config tools are better than Redhat's--nice for new users.

      2) Equal support for KDE and Gnome.

      3) [And this is the real winner] the urpmi tools for automated package management. The repositories are newer than debian-stable without being bleeding edge, and for packages not included (rare given the size of the repositories!) you can use it to stuff in rpm's you've found on your own, and still check and download their dependencies manually. Works pretty well flawlessly, and it's this command line pro
    • I do not know about Mandrake but I can tell you that Fedora Core3 does not work on the Intel 810 graphics chip out of the box.
      Does Mandrake have a point? Yes it is a choice and choice is good. Mandrake has a very good installer.
      BTW Suse 9.2 works great with the 810.
  • C'mon guys... Mandrake is a very nice distro for totally n00bs who like cute stuff. It's a nice replacement for Teletub... I mean, Windows XP desktops. My mother would love it! I'd love it also if it included a wallpaper featuring Gaël naked, but as it does not, I love my Gentoo.
    • Is this to imply that Gentoo includes a wallpaper of Gael naked? Do tell! On a more serious note, Mandrake is more than eye-candy, as I explain above.
      • I knew someone was going to ask that. I'll leave the mistery in the air: does Gentoo secretly includes a naked Gael wallpaper?
        (but having a Gael wallpaper would certainly make Mandrake even more eye-candy)
    • Mandrake is for nobody. It has all the disadvantages of WinXP (slow, unstable) without any of the advantages. People say it's easy to use, but Knoppix is way easier both to use and install thanks to the automatic hardware detection.

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