Submitted by Five weeks after the formal release of Mandriva Linux 2006 to members of the Mandriva Club, the CD and DVD images of the “Free” edition (GPL software only) are now also available for free download.
Mandriva Linux 2006 ISO Images Available
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I don’t mean to be too picky but could you try and get your facts right.
“CD and DVD images of the “Free” edition (GPL software only)”
GPL only? Does this mean we aren’t going to get x.org or Gnome or any other of the great pieces of software under other OSI approved licenses? There are more open source licenses than the GPL and I guarantee that there is more software in the community release than is merely available under GPL.
Exactly right, it should say “free and open source software only”.
have a look here, then you might understand why Eugenia said “free” for
http://frontal2.mandriva.com/en/community/users/download
Edited 2005-11-14 04:53
“have a look here, then you might understand why Eugenia said “free” for”
It’s not the word “free” I am worried about, its the “GPL software only” that is wrong. Look believe it or not but technologies such as X existed before the Free Software Foundation came about and long before the Linux Kernel. X.org is under an MIT license and yes it is included in the community release as such. It’s no biggy but I think it fair to acknowledge the work that is conducted by these great projects.
How can we expect non-traditional journalism formats to be taken seriously when someone who has been reporting on technology matters for many a year now can’t be clear, consice and factual in what they publish. I would pull up the newspapers for bad reporting, why not OSNews.
It seems a bit weird, the ‘flagship’ distro for newbies (mandriva) has software like pre-releases of X.org and OpenOffice (and a couple of other things) in the 2006 version.
Does this really affect the stability of things? it seems a bit bleeding edge..
So does Ubuntu…
The way I look at things is that when most open source projects make a stable product they mean mainframe stable, there are exceptions of course.
Take for instance Debian, Sarge was in testing for quite a long time, I am by no means a power user and I was using what was supposedly an unstable system well before the project announced it as stable. Sid is a different story, that I would categorze as bleeding edge.
Solaris Nevada releases are another great example of this.
You can get away with a little bit more on a desktop system, a majority of users have been conditioned to accept random crashes and the like so they don’t really view as a big issue.
my 2 cents
Take for instance Debian (…) Sid is a different story, that I would categorze as bleeding edge.
I wouldn’t even call Sid bleeding edge. I quite like it (it’s one of my currently installed distros) but it’s not quite bleeding edge. It’s still at GNOME 2.10 and KDE 3.4.2, quite close but not quite bleeding edge. Bleeding edge is more what I’m doing on Arch Linux right now, KDE 3.5 RC1 (installed from Arch’s testing repository).
As far the inclusion of OpenOffice.org 2.0 RCs is concerned it’s not just Ubuntu also doing that, but pretty much every distro that was released recently that had been put together before 2.0 final came out. I’m not in on that decision making for any distribution, but I think it was the improvement over the 1.1.x series (including open document support) coupled with the stability of the RCs the probably that swayed them. I can attest to that stability myself, I was using OOo 2 RCs myself for a while and never had one crash on me at all.
Does this really affect the stability of things?
Don’t think so. I have done a network upgrade from 2005, and it seems just fine. Quite a few little niggles from 2005 are fixed.
The officially supported OO.o in 2006 is 1.1.5. That’s the one that’s in main. The 2.0 pre-release is in contrib. For me it’s very stable, but someone reported that the presentation module was a bit crash-y for them. There’s a set of OO.o 2.0 final RPMs (and GNOME 2.12) available for Club members.
X.org…well, it’s not _unstable_ as such, but it’s kind of buggy. If it works with your card, it’ll work fine forever. However, the CVS snapshot we used doesn’t work properly with some quite common cards. There’s an updated CVS snapshot available from http://www.seerofsouls.com/ (it’s just a rebuilt Cooker package) which fixes most X issues. There will be an official update when X 6.9 final is released (scheduled in December).
It seems Mandriva takes longer and longer to release free edition ISO downloads after the “official release”.
I once used Mandriva because i found it the most easy and friendly distro, but now, I use Fedora, which is almost as easy to use, and you can get ISO images to download on the same day of release.
I once used Mandriva because i found it the most easy and friendly distro, but now, I use Fedora, which is almost as easy to use, and you can get ISO images to download on the same day of release.
Me I did a network install, wich I found just as easy, as long as one has the bandwidth of course. To me they can just keep the ISOs, and they’re not breaking with GPL or any other licenses by delaying them some weeks.
I did a network install as well and found it easier that SuSe to set up. It was quicker, too. And this was less than 5 days after the intial release when the mirrors were getting hammered.
What do you get in the club edition that you don’t get in the free edition? Don’t say non-free software. I am curious WHAT this non-free software does.
I am not really sure what is free and what is not, but the way you get anything you want which is not included is to add the plf (penguin liberation front) archives to your sources in rpmdrake. So in practice the distinction is meaningless, as long as you know what you want. Someone else will be able to spell out the legal reasons for the distinction – but to the user, its academic.
plf doesn’t have all the commercial software that we ship in the commercial release (and the commercial release doesn’t have everything that’s in plf). plf is intended primarily for free software which has patent issues, and nearly-free software like pine, although it does have a non-free software section.
plf contains non-free software, things like dvdcss, win32-codecs, real-codecs, etc
CLub, has things like Nvidia/Ati binary drivers, Java, Flash, Archiae?? Backup, (spelt something like that)
best thing to do….
install Mandriva, pay into Club, get all their stuff, add plf repository, get all their stuff too
🙂
Install Mandriva, pay into Club, get all their stuff, add plf repository, get all their stuff too.
And that’s what I do also.
What do you get in the club edition that you don’t get in the free edition? Don’t say non-free software.
Non-free software.
I am curious WHAT this non-free software does.
Steals you soul.
Seriously, we’re talking the usual – Java/ Flash/ Nvidia/ Ati – stuff that cannot be realeased in a gpl-ish [I wanted to make up a word!] distribution.