In an interview with LinuxQuestions.org Mandrake Linux Founder Gael Duval gives an update on the financial status of MandrakeSoft, his opinion on the acceptance of Linux on the desktop, user response to the Mandrake Club, his response to the UserLinux manifesto and the recent Red Hat plans.
Interview with MandrakeSoft Founder Gael Duval
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Like it or not, several people have migrated away from RHL with the move to Fedora and SuSE is not free. This leaves Mandrake and slackware as the remaining major free RPM distros. I am sure both of them will see a growing user-base. Mandrakeclub will make money because people like being able to find and download RPM’s they know will work on the system they are running. With Linux it always seems to come down to the ability to install working packages.
Slackware is barely an RPM distro…it has it’s own packaging system, and rpm support is a hack at best…
IMO MDK is neither fish nor meet. Are they targeting the corporate or home desktop market or are they after the server market.
I have not used xandros nor have i ever touched Lindows, but I reckon that they are on a path were MDK was supposed to be. Both address the desktop market with grater success than mdk. Both have a more mature product and better services to offer than MDK.
Anyways, I’ll give Slack a go as soon as I have more time…. and why not, Libranet is on my List as well.
Mandrake was the first distro that I actually _like_ after my initial shock of trying to use Red Hat. However, I hate to think that Mandy’s success came primarily due to its support for RPMs (as mentioned by Gael).
Seriously, RPMs are a pain and to me, it’s the worst packaging system ever implemented. I honestly feel that the only reason it was so popular is that it’s from Red Hat… and in most people’s mind Red Hat is Linux.
Mandrake would’ve smoked RH out of the water if it had implemented a packaging system closer to apt, portage or Slack’s tgz along with their expertise at designing a user-friendly GUI frontend for it.
It’s the only distribution I’ve used that has worked perfectly right of the box on every one of my systems. Even Knoppix choked on my dual video/monitor setup, and Mandrake configured it automatically w/ Xinerama. And this was Mandrake 9.0 against Knoppix 3.3.
I don’t use it now, but I recommend it to every newb.
“Mandrake would’ve smoked RH out of the water if it had implemented a packaging system closer to apt, portage or Slack’s tgz along with their expertise at designing a user-friendly GUI frontend for it.”
uh, they did…
it’s called urpmi and the GUI front end is RPMDrake
I have never been a mandarke fan. However, its great to hear that they will be leaving chap 11 soon.
As for package mgt: their are some nice gui’s out their (from what i hear).
GUI-Front Ends
Synaptic rpm/apt-get
swaret for slacks tar.gz
yum for rpm’s.
Good tools for the dependency resolutions. However apt-get and pkg_add just rock if you like the command line.
I would see people migrating from Redhat to Suse, Slackware or Debian.
I use Gentoo for all my server needs.
I don’t install any GUI, just the base command line system. This takes about 45 minutes to install.
yes it takes longer than RH or SUSE, but the time is made up by using Portage to install packages. I never have to worry about depencecies and most of the command line stuff compiles very quickly.
and the speed increase is very noticable over a binary based disto.
mandrakes rpms system is not bad at all. MandrakeUpdate does a lot of the work and finds the dependencies. its not like Red Hat lol. It is a good distro for personal use i think because it comes with a lot of the basic software that any distro should, like gnome, kde, OpenOffice, Xine, and others. im really glad to read this article.
Lindows doesnt feel like Linux which i still think a linux desktop distro should be like.
Xandros is pretty good from what I hear and Ill be buying the Deluxe Edition from them later but I think that Madrake for its price 0$ for the regular version, and updates that work is not bad.
I haven’t tried mandrake yet. I will be loading it up this weekend. I like Mandrakes current focus on the desktop and not abandoning the home user. Xandros promises to be a good desktop distro, but is not freely downloadable. I think they are going to have a downloadable trial, So I will download and evaluate it. I am currently messing with debian, slackware 9.1, Redhat9. I am looking for my perfect desktop distro. When I find it I won’t mind shelling out some cash to support it. Right now Redhat9 wins out for me. I have been critical of redhats new support policy, but they have a good product. I am looking forward to trying Mandrake and the new xandros.
Its great news that Mandrake is recovering, they are a big part of the Linux world.
As for Xandros, version 2 should rock from what eveybody has been saying. It’s amazing what these guys have done.
Also you are right that they will have a month long trial of the standard edition of Xandros (actually even lower than standard). If anybdoy is going to try Xandros at all, Deluxe is the way to go, it is the onyl distribution to include all the necessery commercial applications for Linux right outside the box. Mp3 support, realpalyer 8, java 1.4.2, flash 6, crossover office crossover plugin etc. And they really are the most polished distribution anywhere, what they have works and works well. You won’t find thousands of untested apps without icons even like in SUSE 9. And the great part is that it is also up to date, KDE 3.1.4, Xfree 4.3, GTK 2.4.x, Mozilla 1.4 or 1.5, kernel 2.4.22 (enchanced) and the like. They also have some very sueful tools like their file manager which is the best in its class for any OS I’ve used and that’s just version 1. I highly recommend them, from what I’ve been hearing and from trying v1.
It seems many people constantly give rpm a bad name. There is not much difference between rpm and deb, and I think rpm is better than tgz. apt-get is available for rpm, and you can use urpmi and yum as well, and yup on yellow dog. RPM did solve some problems which is why it became very popular. The only reason deb seems better is because debian based distros have not fragmented and they are essentially the same distro. I have used apt-get on rpm with many repositories at once with no problems at all. All it takes is making sure your repositories do not have dependency issues themselves, like multiple glibc’s and so on.
Seriously, there is not so much advantage to deb, if any at all. RPM does have a few useful tricks up its sleeve as well.
And I wonder why debs get mentioned every time an rpm based distro is mentioned. Are people just trying to advertise every moment they can.
I tend to agree with you completely. I have never try deb so I don’t know what it’s like but certainly never have any problem with rpm. I really like it.
as always, i’m not really impressed with your analysis.
even though, i’m running debian and freebsd now (gotta love aptitude & portupgrade), i ran redhat for many years.
but in all seriousness, there was absolutely nothing wrong with rpms.
with repositories like dag, freshrpms, planet-ccrma, & newrpms, YOU HAD YOUR CAKE AND ATE IT TOO.
of course if you never heard of those sites and are raggin on rpm, your opinion means squat.
(goes back to xp machine, which will be dual booting freebsd 5.2 rc2 shortly)
If Mandrake want to take off in any big way they will have to fix some of their reliability problems. To connect to the Internet with my modem (Speedtouch USB) needs a command-line method which I found on Google; the connection wizard they supply does not work (it didn’t in 9.1 either). The system crashed, twice, inexplicably, when I was using it (it seemed to go into a perpetual swap, lots of hard disk activity, but you couldn’t make anything happen). Apart from that, their version of Emacs is not very good (it’s barely readable in 1280×1024 unless you have a big monitor, which is not the case with SuSE’s version). In the end I just went back to SUSE.
RPM still doesn’t support “suggests” or “recommends” tags, AFAIK.
“with repositories like dag, freshrpms, planet-ccrma, & newrpms, YOU HAD YOUR CAKE AND ATE IT TOO”
Not really. Each separate repository has different packaging and QA policies (if they have any at all). It’s a bit like playing Russian roulette every time you install a package.
Mandrake is a badly run organisation. I remember hearing someone say, “geeks can’t run businesses” and Mandrake is the perfect example of this.
Mandrake need to decide what their target market is, then decide how they are going to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market, then they have to decide how they will add value onto a base which is being offered free of charge, simply saying, “please buy us” is not going to compell anyone, be it Joe User or Joe Geek, to purchase the software unless they can see that the price they pay is worth it.
For example, why not have a standard and enhanced version; the ehanced version includes WineX and Crossover Office. Work together with big name software companies, license the source code, port it to Linux and resell it (aka Loki). Simply selling Linux isn’t a long term viable stratergy, there has to be some meat there and I am sorry, people also want to see integration in their OS and products that run on top it.
Great news concerning Mandrake-I am trully glad to hear they are on their way back to profitability- I don’t use Mandrake currently, but I would hate to see them go.
People have not been trying to give RPM a bad name- it deserved the reputation it has. Apt-get, from Debian, is much older than RPM-it was and remains a superior binary-baed package management system. The efforts to port apt-get to the RPM world are, at best, band-aids, glossing over the fundamental problems of RPM-but not solving them at all. RPM is trully impressive from a single vantage point: from the vantage point of Linux distributors. RPM make their lives easier, no doubt, but this has never translated to the end-user. Ideally RPM works best when all of the software one uses comes from one source, the distributor, and is only upgraded for security patches and when doing a system-wide update-ie. from 9.0 to 9.1. One can use RPM, no doubt, it does *work*, and for users who are content to work with that which they purchased(most RPM based distros are commercial distros), RPM is fine. But if you wish to use the latest and greatest, if you love experimenting, if you are a developer who needs fine-grained control- RPM can quickly become your worst enemy.
BAck in the day when I first started using Linux I was trully impressed by RPM. I discovered this when switching to SuSE 5.1 from slackware 3.0(I had used slackware earlier, already back in ’93, but I couldn’t get it to do much of anything). Compared to slackware back then SuSE was amazing-so many packages, so many CD’s, everything anyone could ever need all right there. At that time wanting new software meant waiting till the next version release of the distro.
Only recently has it become viable to download new packages for SuSE- there were no user-supported cites for getting new versions of obscure or unsupported software. Redhat and Mandrake have faired better on this front, but the issues remain similiar. I personally never could get into Debian- the attitudes from their users was so bad, and remains so, that I could never feel part of *their* community- even though I appreciate and value their contributions and their technology.
But once I discovered source based distros, in particular gentoo, I have never looked back. As a sys admin running an LTSP server I have encountered these issues once again. Our department has used SuSE for years. I took over from the old admin and was left in charge of crafting a user-freindly desktop for our users. RPM struck again. Sure if I simply accepted SuSE defaults-which is crafted for home computers- I would not have encountered so many problems.
But LTSP is a hybrid situation- it is at once a server *and* a desktop. The SuSE standard of KDE is simply not viable, IMHO, for a thin-client solution with transient users with no Linux experience. Their GNOME implementation is an abomination. The old admin had left everything as defined by SuSE default. It *worked* but it was an absolute eye-sore and so counter-intuitive that the users never ventured beyond Mozilla and Staroffice. I wanted to use GNOME- simpler interface, less clutter, ie. an example where less *is* more.
I tried and tried to get a good setup of GNOME under SuSE- customizing the menus, panel apps and desktop links for the specific requirements of our environment- but to no avail. After despairing about SuSE’s implementation of GNOME I decided to use source RPMS of Ximian to try and get an aesthetically pleasing system up and running. I had to use RPMS becuase the binary RPM’s were linked against openssl-.0.9.6 and SuSE 9.0 uses the latest openssl-0.9.7. I built the source RPMS and found myself in an entrenched battle with the .spec files. It was a horrific experience and the end result proved so unstable that I regretted the day that RPM was born. In order to use the Ximian RPMS I had to break virtually every RPM dependency on the installed system. Even if what I attempted had worked I would not have ever been able to use a SuSE RPM again-incompatible libraries.
This has taught me a lesson. I will never willingly use any RPM based distro again, for any real work that I have to do. I want source, I want a good development environment, I want access to unmolested versions of the software I use, I want choice and the ability to implement things how I see fit-and to this end Gentoo is for me by far the best answer. For a home user RPM maybe fine, and it may be fine for any application with established and well defined functionality, such as a web-server, or print-server, or samba-server.ie very specific predefined roles. For anything more advanced RPM is simply more trouble than its worth, IMNSHO. In my eyes binary-based distros are the problem and source based distros are the solution.
I don’t understand why people have to continue talking about installing rpms from the command line. Mandrake has some good GUI tools and in addition to URPMI (which is very similar to apt IMO) it makes a great combination. Since Mandrake 8 I can’t remember being in dependancy hell.
> use Gentoo for all my server needs.
I don’t install any GUI, just the base command line system. This takes about 45 minutes to install.
yes it takes longer than RH or SUSE, but the time is made up by using Portage to install packages. I never have to worry about depencecies and most of the command line stuff compiles very quickly.
and the speed increase is very noticable over a binary based disto.
I also use gentoo … It’s so nice to compile everything myselve, and the best way to have THE distribution u need is to build it uself. But one thing about gentoo that’s really bad is that emerge don’t take care about package dependencies than removing a sofware. so … u will never be able to remove the library u don’t need anymore – because u don’t if us still need than . Sad. for that urpmi /apt-get are a little bit better
you make a couple of good points syntaxis.
but debian and freebsd have their share of issues.
the russian roulette issue on redhat is no different then running debian unstable, or stable with a lot of backports.
just like with any os, if you are an experienced hand, you can circumvent the ugly stuff.
I am constantly suprised by people with such strong opinions on different distro’s and yet they talk of ‘loading it up’ at the weekend, and currently playing with several. You can’t properly know if a distribution is decent for use unless you properly use it. This doesn’t mean having it running for a few hours before returning to windows ‘to get some work done’ (snort).
“you make a couple of good points syntaxis.”
Lol – right back at you. 😀
“the russian roulette issue on redhat is no different then running debian unstable”
Hmmmm… How so?
Each package in Unstable is packaged in accordance with Debian policy by a registered developer, and there are numerous channels through which the user can obtain support (the BTS, the maintainer, the debian-user mailing list, #debian on IRC, etc). As far as I could tell, there’s no comparable level of QA or support for any of the repositories mentioned in the post I was originally replying to.
Also, the sheer size of the Debian archive means that there’s comparatively little need to refer to third party sources, and ensures that all the packages have been tested in conjunction with one other.
“but debian and freebsd have their share of issues.”
Sure, no argument there.
A lot of people seem to complain that Mandrake’s problem is that it doesn’t focus only on desktop users or only on corporate workstations or only on servers. Why can’t we have distributions that offer a bit of everything?
I use Mandrake at home AND work, sometimes as my main desktop machine to browse the web, listen to oggs, write documents, etc. But I have also used those machines to run database and web servers as part of my web development job. Granted, you wouldn’t run desktop processes on a dedicated server, but sometimes you need a machine to do a bit of everything.
We have quite a few Debian machines at work. For various reasons my Mandrake setup is a lot more functional then any of them. I wish Mandrake well for the future.