According to this press release, European Linux developer Mandrakesoft has acquired the Brazilian Conectiva. Says the release, “This acquisition is expected to increase significantly Mandrakesoft’s size and R&D capabilities.“
Mandraketiva? Mandrakesoft Acquires Conectiva
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Adam Scheinberg
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Mandrake: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=155&slide=9
Conectiva: http://shots.osdir.com/slideshows/slideshow.php?release=77&slide=3
Wow, that would be something new for both Mandrake and Connectiva. I thought they were just picking different software and package it together. Just like most others involved in Linux…
Do you realise that you are talking about connectiva which has developed apt4rpm, synaptic, smartpm amoung other packages. they sponspor the 2.4 kernel maintainer.
Redhat has R&D divisions too. Disclosure: I work there
Assuming Linux distributions do just packaging is very ironical indeed
guess mandrake are no longer broke enough that they can afford to buy another company, and continue to pay two companies worth of employee salary..
seems they are in better financial position than they have been alluding to?
connectiva was always very interesting from a non-english distro side of things, they have some good programmers.
Wasn’t apt originally done by Debian? Same as synaptic? Unless Connectiva rewrote everything, it would be more like porting existing DEB package management tools to work with RPM.
I think this is great for a couple of reasons, R&D should always be done to enhance software and hardware alike, maybe just, maybe, Mandrake will include apt4rpm in Mandrake Linux, that will lead to more sales because of ease of use (which it kinda is anyways) which will create more competition, which will create more innovation. ^_^
By joining forces, two of the best desktop / server distributions now have a lot more power to develop a great distribution.
Conectiva and Mandrake were always sane, and look very much alike: KDE as default, but good GNOME support, excellent desktop, fast improving servers. Curitiba is very much a Linux development center now, with many hackers.
Maybe they will take some of the Connectiva guys who do the artwork and set them to work on Mandrake’s awful default background and bootsplash!
Apt: debian made.
apt4rpm and synaptic: Conectiva started them.
The development style at conectiva had been better for a long time. It was a pity they did not target the european market any earlier. This seems an easy way to expand for both. I hope they do the right pick what managers and developers are synergied out.
they sponspor the 2.4 kernel maintainer
They used to, but not any more. Marcelo Tosatti left Conectiva quite a while ago.
“Wasn’t apt originally done by Debian? Same as synaptic? Unless Connectiva rewrote everything, it would be more like porting existing DEB package management tools to work with RPM.”
well rpm is very different debian packages from the technical perspective. so apt4rpm is almost a complete rewrite. its not maintained anymore since connectiva has a new project called smartpm.
btw one of the reasons apt4pm isnt distributed by fedora is that its unmainted, large amount of code we cannot support and does not provide multi lib compatibility
If Mandrake had some marketing muscle, they could easily become the number 1 Linux Desktop disto in North America. They aren’t ready to compete with Redhat just yet in the Bussiness community, but Mandrake Linux has definitely found the secret of how to create a desktop that is friendly to new commers to Linux, without being stripped of all the expert tools for seasoned linux veterans. This is a great purchase for Mandrake because Connectiva is already profitable. More revenue, more developers, and more Linux converts I hope.
Mandrake announced a while ago that they had started to turn a profit, or were set to turn a profit with their current income. The major financial troubles they had are not around anymore from what I understand.
>Mandrake will include apt4rpm in Mandrake Linux, that
>will lead to more sales because of ease of use
And why is that? Please enlighten me. How is apt4rpm any easier to use than Mandrakes urmpi? Besides since apt4rpm are largely unmaintained these days, as it’s creators have abandoned it, how can switching to it make any sense whatsoever?
“And why is that? Please enlighten me. How is apt4rpm any easier to use than Mandrakes urmpi? Besides since apt4rpm are largely unmaintained these days, as it’s creators have abandoned it, how can switching to it make any sense whatsoever?”
exactly. if mandrake wants to switch, then smartpm is a better choice than apt4rpm
IMO acquiring connectiva just to switch to apt4rpm is silly. The better benefits lies with a more capable in house development team.
>then smartpm is a better choice than apt4rpm
urpmi works already very well and is still in full development.
looking forward with a smile:)
“btw one of the reasons apt4pm isnt distributed by fedora is that its unmainted, large amount of code we cannot support and does not provide multi lib compatibility”
I beg your pardon? I can talk only about the SUSE one, and it has been getting (a lot) better all the time.
This was an intensily smart move. The opensource movement is happening down there and the government really wants to move away from MS. Mandrake positioning themselves to take advantage of a blossoming market for subscription revenue was really smart. Hope they do well with it.
“I beg your pardon? I can talk only about the SUSE one, and it has been getting (a lot) better all the time.”
suse doesnt support apt4rpm by default in a multi lib system afaik. apt4rpm is UNMAINTAINED. how hard is that to understand?
“urpmi works already very well”
I have a different opinion. I know pretty well both urpmi and apt4rpm for SUSE and the latter is a lot more effective. Maybe because everything is kept in a central mirror?
>Maybe because everything is kept in a central mirror?
You mean for urpmi ? No I have media (repositories) from official mirrors (main, contrib) but also from external sources (plf, thacs…) I did not have significant problems actually, but cannot speak for others. There may be sometimes mirrors down, but this is not Mandrake’s problem. Also, I use it for a Cooker machine (with development version) and so I update daily, with no issues.
apt-get has been in MDK contribs for at least a year and a half now, as has synaptic, and there are even MDK mirrors with apt package lists so you can use it.
“I have a different opinion. I know pretty well both urpmi and apt4rpm for SUSE and the latter is a lot more effective. Maybe because everything is kept in a central mirror?”
Well in that case it’s got absolutely zip to do with the packaging software, has it? How you can possibly say ‘SuSE has better mirrors than MDK, so that means apt4rpm is better than urpmi’? Sheesh, that’s just crazy.
has it = hasn’t it
you can = can you
yikes, it’s early.
“suse doesnt support apt4rpm by default in a multi lib system afaik. apt4rpm is UNMAINTAINED. how hard is that to understand?”
It is not officially mantained, but accepted. What about Richard Bos and all the others? Are they ghosts?
>Maybe because everything is kept in a central mirror?
You mean for urpmi ?”
No. I mean SUSE:
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/
“Well in that case it’s got absolutely zip to do with the packaging software, has it? How you can possibly say ‘SuSE has better mirrors than MDK, so that means apt4rpm is better than urpmi’? Sheesh, that’s just crazy.”
Did I say any of that? I just said that one possible reasons why SUSE apt4rpm works better is because everything is kept in one single, powerful mirror.
But I guess this mirror would be saturated if every Suse user on the planet was using it ? So I guess that if you use another mirror, you may have the same problem of mirrors down.
Mandrakelinux has also a primary mirror (and a couple of secondaries) that works well. BTW, for my cooker system, I do a rsync image of it on my machine, then I update. This is safer.
The nice thing with urpmi will be the support of different mirrors for the same media. This is planned, as far as I know.
“But I guess this mirror would be saturated if every Suse user on the planet was using it”
Yes, I suppose so, but there are mirrors which never seem to saturate. A good example is the nluug one.
Yes, but this is the same with Mandrake. Easyurpmi maintains a base of “good” mirrors.
Anyway, I think that urpmi will be the update manager. Now what should be improved is the graphical installer.
You replied to a post that said urpmi worked well and said no, it didn’t, apt4rpm worked better. They are the package utilities. They are not the mirrors. If what you wanted to say is that you find MDK’s mirrors less reliable than SuSE’s, you should have said that, not disputed the fact that *urpmi* works well. urpmi does exactly what it is intended to do.
the last release of conectiva i tried sucked, but i have always like mandrake, to bad i stopped using it and switched to arch. wonder if they will replace urpmi with apt-rpm.
Brilliant move! Brazil is one of the largest Linux markets in the world and Linux is spreading from Brazil to the rest of Latin America.
Mandrake picked the low-hanging fruit and got a bunch of clients and great development talent!
Give Mandrake 18 months and you are likely to see a very different Linux world. The good news too is that the rpm distributions are consolidating. This brings it down to three: Mandrake, Suse and Red Hat.
The Debian world is also consolidating: Debian/Ubuntu, Xandros, Linspire.
All the other ones are hacker distributions which server as great testing grounds for new ideas and to satisfy the whims and preferences of their creators/users.
Now, that’s a surprise… Conectiva has a very strong support and documentation group, they do more work supporting their clients than any other thing…
I really don’t know what to expect from this merge, but let’s see…
I do like Mandrake (in fact, I am writing this post under MDK 10.1), and hope to see bright future of this distro.
just wanted to express my greetings and good wishes
A.
Congrats to Mandrake, hope it goes well
No, there’d be no reason to. apt-rpm has always been open source, after all, if MDK wanted to use it they don’t need to buy Conectiva in order to do that. urpmi is MDKsoft’s tool, has important features that apt-rpm doesn’t, and is already used on all the mirrors and in other MDK utilities, there’d be no benefit in moving.
Not only does Mandrake put out a fantastic distribution (the best all around, IMHO), but they have been really getting their business and marketing act together over the last two years or so.
First, they emerged from bankruptcy protection. Then they were able to cut unnecessary costs. Then they were able to gradually get in the black. Then they were able to generate extra cash by floating stock. Then they were able to start acquiring other companies (including a services company, and others). Then they were able to expand their product line, from portable hard drive, to Mandrake “goodies”, to Mandrake Move, to business server and desktop versions, and so on. Then they’ve been expanding their ISV market in North America. Then they modified their release schedule to be more palpable to the community, and iron out early bugs more efficiently (Mandrake Community edition). Then they’ve been signing up with hardware providers. Then they’ve been getting governement contracts. And they’ve done all of this while remaining open source.
And now they’ve acquired Connectiva, another Linux company that is profitable and really has it’s act together (in both a technical and business sense), and which has natural synergies with Mandrake.
I expect Mandrake will continue to put out and improve on their fantastic distribution, and continue to be a business success.
For one did you even read my post, “maybe,just maybe, they will include it” , second I didnt know, that there was a new one they could include, third, apt4rpm+synaptic, was and is alot better the urmpi, think about the ease of use, you want grandma using the commandline?
You have been enlightened.
Go Mandrake!!!
Have you ever even used Mandrakelinux before? There are graphical tools for using urpmi as well. In fact some of the easiest to use tools. They are working hard in 10.2 to make them even better.
If you have a Mandrakelinux install around try running ‘rpmdrake’ as root. This will allow you to install any packages you have in set up in your repositories. No command line necessary.
Bret Baptist.
>apt4rpm+synaptic, was and is alot better the urmpi, think about
>the ease of use, you want grandma using the commandline?
I still ask, in what way are apt4rpm better than urmpi? And it has noting to do with commandline, since most mandrake users use the RpmDrake GUI. But I can add in what way, are the equivalent, synaptic better than RpmDrake?
>…since most mandrake users use the RpmDrake GUI.
Rpmdrake blows!!!
Its the main reason i don’t use mandrake anymore. Synaptic kicks its butt. Hopefully Mandrake will dump rpmdrake like toxic waste and start including synaptic in their distro.
“If Mandrake had some marketing muscle, they could easily become the number 1 Linux Desktop disto in North America. They aren’t ready to compete with Redhat just yet in the Bussiness community, but Mandrake Linux has definitely found the secret of how to create a desktop that is friendly to new commers to Linux, without being stripped of all the expert tools for seasoned linux veterans. ”
Sounds like Novell SuSe to me. Desktop end, and server covered. Expert and newbies both.
rpmdrake is a very simple software installer which wraps the urpm backend. It’s not an urpmi front end, per se. synaptic is an apt-get frontend; it can do a considerable amount of the stuff apt-get can do. This is great for power users, but it confuses the hell out of newbies. rpmdrake is made for newbies, and it’s very good for this purpose. It’s got very few buttons and you can’t break it.
“Sounds like Novell SuSe to me. Desktop end, and server covered. Expert and newbies both.”
Not really. SuSe is nice, but any distro that doesn’t come out of the box (preinstalled) with software compilation tools isn’t exactly what I’d call Linux expert friendly (Desktop editions). Suse is very polished and good for newbies though. It’s pretty solid once you get a couple of developer libries and some software building tools installed. Suse has a very dedicated community when it comes to packages, so I guess they can get a pass. I myself like having packages, but every now and again, I like to use make and make install. In the Linux Format Distro wars article from last month, Suse did manage to finish in 3rd place which is where I would place them also, right behind Mandrake(1) and Redhat(2). The Connectiva aquisition may give Mandrake the firepower it needs to make a run at Redhat when it comes to inteprise solutions.
“SuSe is nice, but any distro that doesn’t come out of the box (preinstalled) with software compilation tools isn’t exactly what I’d call Linux expert friendly (Desktop editions). Suse is very polished and good for newbies though. It’s pretty solid once you get a couple of developer libries and some software building tools installed”
Sorry, but which version of SUSE did you try? The only one which didn’t have development tools was 9.1 Personal. SUSE Pro has tons available.
In fact SUSE is a great distro out of the box even for the most advanced user.
9.1 Personal was indeed the last version I tried.
Try this one: it is a much better free version:
ftp://trane.caset.buffalo.edu/pub/suse/i386/9.2/iso/SUSE-Linux-9.2…
If that mirror is too busy, look for another one:
http://www.suse.com/en/private/download/ftp/int_mirrors.html
I believe that in a couple of year the new Mandrake/Connectiva, after switching their customer to the new platform, they will acquire turbolinux.
Why? after consolidating their partner/customer in europe and south america they need to acquire an asian manufacturer. so you will have a global player. RH is very strong in the US and have some customer here in Europe, Suse is strong in europe and thanks to Novell they have a good position in the US, but mandrake/connectiva/turbilinux, the can be a global player. not the first one but a 3 place everywhare, which means that the the big HW e SW player (IBM,Oracle, SAP, HP,Dell and so on)the can not ignere them anymore as they are doing now, consolidating is very important for a company
my 2 cents
I suggest Con-Mandrake 🙂
I did not notice that when I moved to cooker from 10.1, what are the improvements?
Mandrake still has problems over their name so it wouldn’t surprise me if they changed it though i doubt it will be con mandrake
that’s why it’s not called Mandrake. it’s called Mandrakesoft, and the product is Mandrakelinux. No legal problems with that name.
I wanted to give Mandrake a fair chance and so I downloaded 10.2 beta 3.
Well, I liked what I saw: look, feel, behaviour..
I was especially impressed because it configured correctly my ADSL modem, something very few distros have been able to do.
A minor annoyance was that supermount didn’t work and I had to mount a CD as root from Konsole: no doubt a temporary bug.
But then came urpmi!!!
I had forgotten how bad it was. It took me literally 2 hours to configure it (yes, I did use Easy Urpmi), between downloads (obviously I have a fast connection) and urpmi calculating. Some times it went on for so long that I believe it had frozen.
Finally I could download what I wanted: pretty good selection, even if I couldn’t find FOTAQ, for instance.
Well, after downloading 595 MB of apps at a rather slow speed, the installation had to be aborted because of missing dependencies! And suddenly I remembered that it used to happen at least 50% of times.
Now it really beats me why anybody wants to keep such an atrocious package manager in an otherwise fine distro (once the bugs have been ironed out, but it is only a beta)
Configuring apt in Debian or in SUSE only takes me a couple of minutes.
Good news!!
Acquiring Con* is a good option for Mandrake coz, almost a zero percent market overlap. The Desktop meets Server is quite a coincidence and that makes the deal brighter.
Both Con* and Man* has given to the community and being friendly has been one of the good points of Man* in these years. As both companies are profitable ones this union will be fruitful for Man* getting into desktops in most of the new installations (not win-converts) of upcoming markets where Con* rule the servers and ATMs. Con* will get the scope of the current market spread of Man*. Its all a win-win game.