To catch up on the changes since their last full interview, Mandrakesoft co-founder Gaël Duval recently agreed to talk with OFB’s editor-in-chief, Timothy R. Butler, about where the company is heading and the state of the industry at the present time. You can read the new interview at OFB.biz
In the Black and Moving Forward: Gael Duval on Mandrake in 2005
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I would like to see a comparison between 2 mini-macs, one with Mandrake, and the other with OSX. The question is not how much does the hardware cost without OSX, but rather: how much is the hardware worth *with* OSX compared to Linux in the consumer or business desktop/multimedia markets?
I am french and your comment is not “cool”.
Free software is not about nations.
Free software is not about nations.
Which is fortunate, because although I use Linux I don’t speak Swedish
Swedish? Neither does Linus – finns have their own lingo.
And even if free software is not about nations, vive la France anyway!
”
Swedish? Neither does Linus – finns have their own lingo.
And even if free software is not about nations, vive la France anyway!
”
Linus does speak Swedish actually. A quote from Wikipedia:
”
His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (roughly 6% of Finland’s population). Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling. He attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master’s degree in computer science. He wrote his M.Sc. thesis about Linux; it is entitled Linux: A Portable Operating System.
”
I read it somewhere else too, but can’t remember where.
There is this issue of a reference distribution which I think really needs serious looking into. Now, as a long time Redhat/Fedora Core user, I think fedora Core actually makes a good reference distro, less the Redhat/Fedora specific features. As far as I know, Redhat does not make much changes to KDE (any changes are just so that things work), and they pay people to develop GNOME (They employ many core developers) and thus are unlikely to have different packages from upstream GNOME, although this may be arguable.
Distros could then pull out stuff like Kudzu if they want to, and remove anaconda, and choose which ever package managers they want. As far as I know, Fedora is LSB compliant, and that covers that other certification.
I suppose distros want certain features which are not always in upstream projects, e.g., Ubuntu’s menus, and so on, but I think the benefits more than make up for the inconvenience. I hate running into packages I cannot install because they require a version of a package which exists in a stock install of distribution “X”, but not in “Y”, and therefore to install that package I have to install a newer version and the risk of breaking many other packages which depends on that same one.
If I could have it my way, developers should stick to older (mature) distros like RHEL 3 (kernel 2.4), redhat 9 etc. Or grab CentOS if you are unwilling to touch anything Redhat branded, or download SUSE 9. Of course this does not go for people developing say GNOME, or KDE, but any other “ancilliary” sofware should be developed on older distros to guarantee compatibility. That is Linux’s biggest problem and the reason why you hear people talking about distro’s being incompatible.
mandrake would have to make your version of linux less buggiest.
I read it somewhere else too, but can’t remember where.
ESR’s http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/L/Linux.html“>Jargon