Mandrakesoft, the makers of Mandrake Linux, appear to be firmly out of the red. According to their site, “Mandrakesoft closed a 3.05 million euros increase of capital via subscription for 508,333 new shares at 6 euros per share, an increase in shares of 10.58%. Shares outstanding are now 5,312,889. […]The strengthened balance sheet reinforces Mandrakesoft’s capacity to grow both organically and externally toward the corporate market.”
Mandrakesoft Raises 3.05 Million Euros
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive • Web Developer • Father • Foodie • Music Snob • OS enthusiast
Follow me on Mastodon @[email protected]
Good, and well deserved – likely they’ll significantly increase there toe-hold in France over the coming years – would be a useful base to build from…..
and now it shows. great news!
…if I’m getting this right, this means they’re not going out of business any more? If so, then that’s good news. 🙂
They had been out of trouble for quite a while now.
A few months ago Mandrakesoft had announced they had a got a research contract with the French government for the use of Linux on large clusters. This contract was in partnership with the French company Bull, which manufactures Itanium-based servers and other big iron.
A few weeks ago it was announced that the French gvt was ordering a large cluster of Bull Novascale servers (total 4500 dual-core Itaniums) for nuclear simulation, a cluster that would rank #2 on the top500 when commissionned next year. It was also announced that the servers would run Linux.
I wonder if that means that some version of Mandrake Linux will run the second most powerfull super-computer in the world…
Looks like the post is slightly misleading. – They are not actually out of the red, they just managed to “retire” some of their debt and got more funding.
They might (and probably are?) still be losing money, so all they did was to buy themselves more time.
“Looks like the post is slightly misleading. – They are not actually out of the red, they just managed to “retire” some of their debt and got more funding.
They might (and probably are?) still be losing money, so all they did was to buy themselves more time.”
I’d be real interested to see you back that up with some sort of proof, a link, something. Without any of it, it amounts to no more than FUD. Not that I’m saying it is, but without something backing the statement up . . .
I think Mandrake will have a hard time surviving in the Linux market place, there is just too many players with similar offerings – their Corporate Server product is LAMP+Mail. No bad software in there – but to really appeal to businesses you need to offer groupware, like Exchange. Suse has their OpenExchange offering which resently was opensourced by the mother company available here: http://mirror.open-xchange.org/ox/EN/community/
With the right setup, skins and plugin modules (like Outlook support for the win32 clients) you have a solid product ontop of an already nice corporate server for the basic tasks of LAMP and fileserving. I have clients asking for Exchange replacements all the time because its incredibly expensive to purchase the client access licenses. If they had this along their offerings im sure they could expand their market share, because groupware is a major seller in my experience, personally we setup PHP based solutions to clients ontop of a POP+Webmail interface, but i have to admit, alot of people want to stick with their Outlook interface, and thus a solution that also caters to them would really be a killer.
If you read their finantial newsletter you will see that as of Dec 1st of this year Mandrakesoft has made a profit. Retiring a good portion of their debt allowed them to keep more of the profits.
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/investors/newsletter/sn041201
As for Groupware, you can install the Opensource version of Openexchange on mandrake. Or you can use Opengroupware, PHPgroupware, or my fav (Not free) is Desknow http://www.desknow.com which I install for people using Mandrake.
Mandrake has a lot of growing to do in Eroupe. Suse even though from Germany is now owned by Novell which will focus more on their US customers then on the German ones. Being that Mandrake is the most well known Linux company after Suse in Eroupe, they have a lot of chances to make a mark!
Mandrake is becoming the leading distribution in Europe. Recently they were awarded a joint research grant from the European Union to work on wireless mobility.
People ought to be happy that there is healthy competition in the Linux space, rather than make up FUD.
It would be better for them to increase there sales volume of boxed set and sales volume of Mandrakeclub subscriptions.
They could always try wall street for sales of futur sale income like Red Hat did wich raised 500 millions.
“Red Hat, Inc. Prices $500 Million of 0.50% Convertible Senior Debentures Due 2024”
http://www.redhat.com/about/presscenter/2004/press_convertible.html
Mandrake problem as always is its management ( Jacques Le Marois specificaly ), François Bancilhon is no Michael Robertson in presence but he look like a Lou Gerstner ( former IBM CEO ) in is method ( almost no press presence but the product and service are top notch under is guidance ( FB not JLM).
If you look at it with an open mind anyone with a brain can see that Mandrakesoft is way more then just a 50 million french company.But open mind and visionnary Mandrakesoft management are not (speaking of JLM).
Did the city of Paris migrate to Mandrake Linux .. or did Microsoft managed to convinced them to stay on?
I can’t find any related news to that – but heard a clip on Steve Balmer saying how Microsoft “won Paris and Pernambuco – Brazil”.
Although I admire Mandrake I have to say their latest releases 10.0 and 10.1 has been a more frustrating experience – specially concerning NVIDIA drivers.
Very unstable KDE that freezes or crashes on a whim.
Mandrake has been in the black for a little over a year now. They are also purchasing other companies. They continue to be the number one distro on distro watch. Mandrake continues to get sparkling reviews. Mandrake has a huge community of loyal users. Mandrake is starting to penetrate the enterprise. They have expanded their product line (look at Mandrakestore.com). And finally, Mandrake is a damn fine distro – the best in my experience (I’ve tried Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Knoppix, Mepis, and Ubuntu).
Things are really looking up for Mandrake, and I wish them continued success. I hope, with new company purchases and government contracts, that they can become more of a player in the enterprise, to compete with Novell/SuSE and Red Hat.
As for Nvidia drivers – Mandrake worked out of the box on Nvidia drivers for me. That was with the PowerPack, which of course, includes the proprietary drivers (the free download version probably does not).
As for KDE – KDE works spectacurily in my Mandrake 10 PowerPack installation, as does Gnome (a rare phenomenon – a distro that supports both Gnome and KDE equally).
I absolutely adore Mandrakelinux. I keep trying other distros, sometimes thinking that the latest distro I try might replace Mandrake as my favorite (this has occured with both Mepis and Ubuntu). But I keep coming back to Mandrake. It is unequalled in it’s over all excellence. Mandrake looks great, it’s fast, it’s super easy, it’s full featured, it’s cutting edge, it’s stable, Mandrake Control Center rocks, the Mandrake installer is one of the best, Mandrake has great package management with urpmi and RPMDrake, it works out of the box with most hardware (as good as or better than Knoppix, SuSE, or Ubuntu), it has great documentation, and is all around the most comfortable and fun distro I’ve used.
Mandrake can be obtained for free, but it is well worth it to purchase one of the boxed sets, especially PowerPack. I will probably buy it once a year (enough of a significant upgrade from previous verison). I’m not getting 10.1, but will probably get 10.2 (or 11, or whatever the next one will be).
If Mandrake can keep this great quality up, and is managed and marketed well, it will continue to grow and thrive. Mandrake is the apex of Linux distros, IMHO.
Mandrake free is unstable and buggy
Mandrake commercial is stable and pretty
This may appear as a rant and criticism.
It is not however .. I mean Mandrake has to survive and some of us cheapskates love downloading stuff not giving anything back.
Mandrake 9.2 was commercial and it worked out of the box.
Mandrake 10 / 10.1 was a free download and well it kinda sucked.
It will happen always
compare WINE with CrossOver.
But the bad thing about that is that it REALLY did give me a horrid impression that MandrakeLinux had suddenly deteriorated.
I was truly planning to purchase say Mandrake 11.0 Powerpack when it comes out – but the free download basically put me off that idea :S
It did send me the wrong message and I stopped recommending it to friends
I like mandrake, but my experience with 10.0 discovery was not very good for me suse 9.0 and 9.1 are much better. but i hope
things keep going well for them
“Mandrake 9.2 was commercial and it worked out of the box.
Mandrake 10 / 10.1 was a free download and well it kinda sucked.”
MDK has always been both commercial and free (depending on the version you get), as far as I know (I am using it since 8.0, currently 10.0, 10.1 and Cooker).
>”Mandrake 9.2 was commercial and it worked out of the box.
>Mandrake 10 / 10.1 was a free download and well it kinda sucked.”
Actually you don’t get it. The commercial and free downloads are exactly the same, except the commercial contains proprietary packages like the Nvidia drivers, sun’s java, macromedia flash plug-in etc. And depending on which version you buy, other commercial applications.
We installed Mandrake 10 for an employee that started in the company I’m working for. It gave him a horrid feeling about linux. KDE is crashing all the time and freezing, plus the 1ghz 1gig ram desktop is sluggish in speed to say the least compared to my Gentoo box with smaller specs.
And then the RPM problems… Dependencies, alot of unsigned packages, not being able to install nvidia drivers, outdated packages……
The Mandrake developers need to spend time on making the distro work. And they need to rethink how they make control panels – several of the mdk control panels that have “overwritten” the KDE panels are inferior to the originals so it does not make sense. And they make their own modifications to KDE which also does not make sense to me.
Debian and Gentoo are pure. I’d rather pay for those than use the Mandrake free edition. It’s sad. Why on earth are RPM distros still popular. They only shed bad light on linux in general, being “newbie distros” that are tested by most newcomers.
Debian really needs a graphical installer. (I use Knoppix. but it’s not official.) If more people could use Debian with APT and all the other goodies, I think it would be easier for more people to adopt linux. As it stands, the newbie distros, like Mandrake, really doesn’t make sense if one wants to stay updated at the same time as productive.
It has nothing to do with a distro you can have a perfectly stable nice running distro with RPM
Take for example … ahm … err …
here is a magic word for you: synaptic
you are not very good at this now are you?
“Mandrake free is unstable and buggy
Mandrake commercial is stable and pretty”
My first encounter with Mandrake was Mandrake 10 Community, which instead of doing a download, I purchased the CD pack from one of the CD vendors (Cheapbytes) for $9. So, in short, this was the free download version. It worked beautifully for me. No bugs, extremely stable, fast, full featured. The main reasons I went for forking out $80 for the Official release of Powerpack box set was I wanted the proprietary drivers, as well as a sample of Mandrakeclub, as well as the documentation, as well as extra packages on CD, and finally I wanted to contribute to Mandrake, as I felt they deserved some of my cash.
Most reviews of the free, Community edition of 10 or 10.1 have been outstanding. Thus, most people have had very good experiences with it.
Every distro will fail with someone’s hardware, or someone might encounter problems while most everyone else doesn’t. This is a fact of life with distros, since hardware is so diverse, and the downloading ISO’s can sometimes produce less than stellar results.
All I can say is that my experience with Mandrake has been fantastic. If I encountered problems like you apparently have (unless you are going by heresay), I might have the same opinion as yours. But I haven’t encountered problems, and I just love the distro.
“We installed Mandrake 10 for an employee that started in the company I’m working for. It gave him a horrid feeling about linux. KDE is crashing all the time and freezing, plus the 1ghz 1gig ram desktop is sluggish in speed to say the least compared to my Gentoo box with smaller specs.
And then the RPM problems… Dependencies, alot of unsigned packages, not being able to install nvidia drivers, outdated packages…… “
You are either lying (and spreading FUD), or you simply got bad CDs or a bad download, plain and simple. Just go paruse the reviews of Mandrake over at DistroWatch. Those reviews wouldn’t be so sparkling if these reviewers encountered such problems.
With Mandrake, I’ve never had a problem with KDE. The only known problem is when people choose to install KDE 3.3 with Mandrake 10.1 (3.2 is the default). Mandrake says that this release of KDE 3.3 is still buggy and you can install it only at your own risk.
As for dependancies – urpmi, with RPMDrake, handles it beautifully. I’ve never had problems with installing either from the CDS, or from one of many free Mandrake package repositories.
As for the bad signatures problem – this is actually a known bug, that Mandrake has posted in it’s errata. The only problem is the referencing of the signature database. They’re not actually bad signatures, they just aren’t being referenced properly. If you get that message, click to install anyway and you won’t have any problems. As for bugs, and all distros get ’em, this is extremely minor.
As for speed – I’m typing this post in a Mandrake 10 installation on an IBM Thinkpad 600 – 300MHz CPU, 228 megs RAM. It is lickity-split fast, even with this old, slow, legacy hardware. It out performs WinXP on my eMachines (1.6 GHz CPU, 256 megs RAM). Mandrake is fast, period.
As for Gentoo – I’ve heard wonderful things about it. The people that have it really love it. But really, how many people actually have 3 days to spare for the ridiculous install? I certainly don’t.
Debian is excellent, but not perfect. It still requires plenty of tweaking and configuring to get everything working. The Debian derivatives are great, however. I previously mentioned Mepis and Ubuntu. Both of these are awesome, and I love ’em and use ’em. But compared to Mandrake, they are incomplete, IMHO.
As for doing complete upgrades – all distros, at one time or another, will encounter problems when the user does too many upgrades, even Debian. I’ve parused the Debian message boards and read plenty about upgrade probems. The bottom line is that an OS is an extremely large and complicated piece of software, and simply upgrading over an existing installation is wrought with risk. It’s true of Unix, Linux, Windows, OSX – all of them. I used to upgrade Windows over existing installations, but always had problems. I tried it with Mandrake (from community to official), but did not like the results. It is always best to do a fresh installation, saving files. Upgrading individual software packages is not a big problem (Mandrake handles individual software upgrades beautifully), but upgrading the complete OS can be a big problem.
I’m not going to blame anyone for not liking Mandrake. If you had bad experiences, fine, use another distro. And distro wars are silly. But I love Mandrake, and most people who’ve used it love it as well.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!!
I’ve noticed on OSNews threads that people who bash Mandrake usually turn around and sing the praises of Debian, Gentoo or Slackware. Those are fine distros, I’m sure. But they are more difficult to install and use than most other distros. It is the hardcore users that like those distros that usually turn their noses up at “newbie” distros, or RPM distros.
It’s okay to like easy to use distros that have lot’s of extras (like Mandrake Control Center, urpmi, easy installer, etc). Linux does not have to be hard to be cool, or “lEEt”.
If anything – if I am anti a distro that would be Suse.
My criticism is because I care about Mandrake.
I could lie.
I could kind of pretend I haven’t had any issues.
I for one, want them to do better and better.
But I have come across some serious issues on both community editions – most notably on 10.1
That made me concerned about a distro that I’ve always been praising and recommending to others.
Shit if that was sole my fault – maybe I buggered the whole setting – fine. But go to the NVIDIA board and you will see people frustrated they can’t install the drivers as easy as before. And then I hear others experience KDE freezes on MDK.
Am I going to keep it hush-hush .. given that Mandrake is like a football team – I secretely sport?
I am no leet Larry Cow fan.
Nor am I the lil devil worshipper.
Never installed Slack – not yet.
If a great distro starts falling behind I think that is reason for alarm.
Why do I hate Suse?
Because Suse is that kind of commercial distro it will work for some but work horribly/terribly for others (plus their support is cold and dismissive) – seriously crap. Check out feedbacks from amazon.co.uk – it drove a lot of people away from LINUX period.
Mandrake wasn’t like that.
It was a safe bet for most people. Independant of laptop – hardware – and processor. People loved it first sight.
But now ? … sure you guys had no problems – but I became aware of a larger proportion of users that have too many (recently I’ve helped out two users).
Even though I don’t use it – Mandrake is the distro I know most about in and out – totally. From editting my own urpmi.conf, i know that filesystem by heart (even where to delete the transactions logs). And editting scripts so that is stops re-writting driver “nv” when you’ve just editted to “nvidia”.
Given I’ve spent so long with a great distro – I think I am right to feel very concerned should it fail to deliver as previously.
There are weeks when I perform probably 50 Linux installs of different distributions, and weeks when it’s about 5 installs.
Just go down the list at distrowatch and take a look at the top 100, I have installed and tried every one of those and many that aren’t listed there.
There is a spot in my heart for Debian and many of it’s offspring, mostly Mepis, Ubuntu and a few others along those lines. From a social viewpoint I absolutly love Debian. Gentoo also, from a social viewpoint is very nice, although I find it does not satisfy many of my needs, begining with a fast install.
We run about 50 servers at work, half of which are Mandrake, about 30% debian and the remainder BSD’s. We prefer Mandrake because it “just works for us” and it is truly a complete distribution. VERY seldom do we have the old, and yes I say old dependency problems that used to plague RPM based distros.
And the desktops at work? A couple Debian and the rest Mandrake, including an LTSP setup running Mandrake for our administative and sales staff. Non of them has difficulties with Mandrake. I have also not seen any of the KDE issues that have been mentioned with the last release.
IMO, Mandrake is the best all around distro available today.
Garret
Actually the magic word for mandrake are: urpmi
🙂
if synaptic is the word for apt-get
then rpmdrake is the word for urpmi
you are not very good at this either now are you?
Please guys, the community edition is very different from the OE. Many times i’ve heard about CE being unstable and buggy… but then i install the OE, and it’s perfect. Mandrake really shines on the desktop.
Victor.
so you would confirm that both free and commercial are very different yeah?
some zealots won’t let me arrive at that conclusion.
they rather have me i dunno recommend something else.
but if i get the assurance the commercial edition is pretty stable rock-on .. then i can confidently persuade people to spend some money on something good.
people dont get it – i am not being negative here, just wanna find out the bottom truth.
bah i give up.
enjoy merry Xmas
Opps, you are right I was not god at it either 🙂
But there are things I’m slightly better at. In this case mandrake releases, and I will admit mandrake has not made it particularly unconfusing:-)
First they release something called Comunity Edition, this one has a free version and versions for club members containing more CD’s with some commercial and proprietary packages.
Some time later they release the Official Edition which is CE with bugfixes. The OE are probably what you think of as the commercial edition, which is partly true since this is the one you get in the boxed sets from mandrake. But you also get a free version of this, but excluding commercial and proprietary packages from the Club and boxed versions.
I hope this clears thing up a bit for you.
merry xmas
I use both FreeBSD and Mandrake.All hardware is detected out of the box so to speak.From Snapscan Touch USB scanner,dvd+-RW drives,SATA HD’s to the Winfast TV-card.Security is allso well arranged.Choose paranoid for system security setting and the user (me) can only swim around in its own home directory.Plenty packages,for the ones this isn’t enough they might visit: easyurpmi.zarb.org for the PLF packages.Although it isn’t initialized the additional mandrake-secure kernel gets installed with libsafe and is allready RSBAC patched.The only comment i could make is that with a AMD XP2500+ 1024 MB DDR FX5700 glxgears gives 3200 FPS where FreeBSD 5.3 on AMD XP2000+ 512 MB sdram TI4200 gives 3600 FPS.Lol the FreeBSD box smokes the Linux box with graphics although the hardware specs would suggest the opposite as outcome.End goog all good,Mandrake 10.1 is the first since 8.2 that’s on my list again.