5 ms·

Mandrake Linux commercial (1999) [video]

47 points by jordigh 11y ago

rijoja 11y ago
I had completely forgotten about Mandrake. But when I tested it way back I recall it seemed quite polished. Why was it that they disappeared?
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  Mandrake 10 was my first ever Linux distro, seemed pretty good to me at the time (though I spent far more time playing Frozen Bubble than learning Linux!). As for what happened to Mandrake, Mandrake became Mandriva after merging with Conectiva Linux, then after some money issues the core Mandriva developers created a fork of Mandriva called Mageia. Mageia is still in active development, version 5 was released in June 2015: http://www.mageia.org/en-gb/ http://www.mageia.org/en-gb/
  - noisy_boy 11y ago
    Mandrake was my first ever Linux too. I bought a box set which included a mousepad and a starters guide - it was imported and cost approx 20% of my monthly salary then. I had to Google at my office for guides on how to configure my dial-up modem and print those pages to try at home in the evening - it was a moment of euphoria when I could finally connect to my 256kbs account. From the point of aesthetics, I think Mandrake was quite advanced - I tried some other distros at that time but none felt as well put together as Mandrake. One of the things that was getting annoying for me was that I kept seeing more and more packages I wanted available as .deb compared to .rpm. At first I just force installed or compiled but that messed up the system since I was walking all over the package manager. I backed-off from installing from source and just stayed with RPM and tried newer distros e.g. SuSE. Most articles on the web that time about installing Debian gave me the impression that I needed to be an "expert" (even after 3-4 years of daily Linux experience as an end-user). When Ubuntu came along, I gave the live CD a try and loved how good Gnome looked, how responsive it was, how it "just worked" most of the time and how 99% of the time apt-get would find me what I wanted. I briefly gave OpenSUSE a try after the Unity forced my hand to leave Ubuntu but YaST felt way too heavy handed. Been using Linux Mint for a while now and I think I'll settle with Mint as long as they dont do "weird stuff". If they do, my next and last distro would be pure Debian.
- Keyframe 11y ago
  They didn't disappear, they changed name to Mandriva. Can't talk about other people, but I remember when it went about in popularity people that used linux already mostly deemed it as too windows-like for their taste. Me included. Windows people didn't like lack of applications they used and games. So it was in that weird limbo between two worlds where neither wanted to use it. Probably the greatest mistake was that they marketed it towards home/desktop users. Game somewhat changed with SUSE, at about the same time, that pushed their distro to corporate environments (and was helped by a fact that Linux himself used it quite often). Only a couple of years later (5-7) would we see Ubuntu and a bit larger array of desktop users applications which were around.
  - deutronium 11y ago
    It looks like Mandriva shut down last year alas, according to Wikipedia.
  - rijoja 11y ago
    Hm you're right about that. Also wasn't there a lot of people that thought qt wasn't open source enough. From what I recall there where some opposition against KDE for this reason. Shame really because it was quite neat.
    - Keyframe 11y ago
      Some opposition is how I would not describe almost a crusade against it :) QT got quite more liberal later.
  - matt_morgan 11y ago
    The name change came as a result of the acq/merger with Conectiva, which was popular (in relative terms) in Brazil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conectiva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conectiva
  - mpol 11y ago
    I was a Mandrake user/developer back then too. The blue colors and cartoonlike icons turned off many people, though they didn't bother me. For years they were the most polished desktop distro. Then Ubuntu came, with some more abstract colors and icons, and they were all the craze suddenly (I never understood why, to this day). They always had problems financially. I don't think there was ever a good business-plan that worked. Sometimes Powerpacks, the MandrakeClub, and also donations. They were always on the brink of disaster. I think in the end the investors were tired and pulled the plug. They were quite big in France, in the military and governent departments. But apparently they don't pay as well as the US pays Red Hat. I still don't know any distro that has an installer that is as good as Mandrake's. And definitely no Mandrake Control Center thingie. Up to this day there is no equivalent to that. They had that nailed. (I do pity the almost yearly rewrites of those as management demanded, and the bugs that came from it). They were also the first distro with a list of pci id's and vendor id's, so drivers would be configured and loaded automatically. We now take it for granted, but this was non-existant on other distro's, you always had to meddle with modprobe.conf.
spystath 11y ago
Mandrake got me into Linux some 12 years ago and it was an excellent effort in general. Quite accessible to the new user and lots of documentation. I have also used briefly Mandriva back in the day before moving to Ubuntu. I believe Mageia is their successor of sorts.
zlatan_todoric 11y ago
Although never user nor developer of Mandrake (Debian dude here) I really appreciated their effort and work, they really did some astonishing in those days, I just really think they didn't have the luck to hit it in right time. They were really innovative and really tried to make user experience great even before PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE and others tried that. While Mageia is there, they seem to have hard time to innovate and keep the pace, but I am still glad they are here.
ajdlinux 11y ago
Linux-Mandrake 7.2 was my first distribution. 14 years later, I'm now working full time in open source, and while I've been on the Debian side of the fence for a while now, I'm still using KDE! So thanks, Mandrake developers!
jhwhite 11y ago
Mandrake was my first Linux distro that I installed in 1999. I remember some friends warning me against Linux at all saying the install would fry my entire computer. I forged ahead and have ran Linux systems off and on from then until now.
jordigh 11y ago
Boy, what a world that was. When everyone took for granted that Linux was a business and there were several competing commercial Linux distributors. How the world has changed.
andrewclunn 11y ago
Anybody else decide to go to: http://www.placeforlinux.com/ http://www.placeforlinux.com/ after watching this?
- rijoja 11y ago
  I was tempted :)
finid 11y ago
Mandrake, which became Mandriva Linux, is history, but it lives on through ROSA Linux, Mageia and OpenMandriva. See http://linuxbsdos.com/category/rosa-desktop; http://linuxbsdos.com/category/rosa-desktop; http://linuxbsdos.com/category/mageia; http://linuxbsdos.com/category/mageia; and http://linuxbsdos.com/category/openmandriva http://linuxbsdos.com/category/openmandriva Mandrake Linux was the third distro I used, after Red Hat and Linux PowerPC 2000. Btw, I still have my 2-set Mandrake Linux 8.1 CD.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > "it lives on through ROSA Linux, Mageia and OpenMandriva." ... and PCLinuxOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCLinuxOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCLinuxOS http://www.pclinuxos.com/ http://www.pclinuxos.com/
  - finid 11y ago
    > ... and PCLinuxOS No, PCLinuxOS used to be based on Mandrake/Mandriva, but not any more.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      The same could be said for the rest of the distros listed. For example, ROSA Linux is now 'Independent' according to DistroWatch: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=rosa http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=rosa
      - finid 11y ago
        > ROSA Linux is now 'Independent' according to DistroWatch ROSA Linux and those I listed became "independent" because Mandriva went bust. PCLinuxOS forged it's own part while Mandriva was still active.
        finid 11y ago
        That was supposed to be PATH, not "part".
colindean 11y ago
Fifteen-year-old me bought this circa 2001! There was a boxed product called "Linux for Windows" or something like that. It simply resized the Windows partition, installed Mandrake, and installed Grub or LILO (can't remember). I installed it on an old Dell Pentium 2 machine I had because I was scared that it would mess up the Windows ME partition on my Compaq P3 800. It wasn't the first time I'd used Linux -- that was Trustix over ssh -- but it was the first graphical distribution I'd tried. Earlier that summer, I'd (painstakingly over a 33 kbps connnection) downloaded Phatlinux, an early live CD distro. I couldn't run it on my Compaq for some reason, but I did get it to work on my aunt's computer. Phatlinux gave me a reason to investigate more and Mandrake let me do it. I think I used Mandrake on that machine until I discovered Red Hat in college (ca. 2003) and I switched to Ubuntu shortly after its first release in 2004.
fit2rule 11y ago
Didn't Yggdrasil do one of these, too? I seem to remember there were other distro TV ads, maybe it was the SLS guys ..

47 points by jordigh 11y ago

I had completely forgotten about Mandrake. But when I tested it way back I recall it seemed quite polished. Why was it that they disappeared?

ZenoArrow 11y ago
Mandrake 10 was my first ever Linux distro, seemed pretty good to me at the time (though I spent far more time playing Frozen Bubble than learning Linux!). As for what happened to Mandrake, Mandrake became Mandriva after merging with Conectiva Linux, then after some money issues the core Mandriva developers created a fork of Mandriva called Mageia. Mageia is still in active development, version 5 was released in June 2015: http://www.mageia.org/en-gb/ http://www.mageia.org/en-gb/
- noisy_boy 11y ago
  Mandrake was my first ever Linux too. I bought a box set which included a mousepad and a starters guide - it was imported and cost approx 20% of my monthly salary then. I had to Google at my office for guides on how to configure my dial-up modem and print those pages to try at home in the evening - it was a moment of euphoria when I could finally connect to my 256kbs account. From the point of aesthetics, I think Mandrake was quite advanced - I tried some other distros at that time but none felt as well put together as Mandrake. One of the things that was getting annoying for me was that I kept seeing more and more packages I wanted available as .deb compared to .rpm. At first I just force installed or compiled but that messed up the system since I was walking all over the package manager. I backed-off from installing from source and just stayed with RPM and tried newer distros e.g. SuSE. Most articles on the web that time about installing Debian gave me the impression that I needed to be an "expert" (even after 3-4 years of daily Linux experience as an end-user). When Ubuntu came along, I gave the live CD a try and loved how good Gnome looked, how responsive it was, how it "just worked" most of the time and how 99% of the time apt-get would find me what I wanted. I briefly gave OpenSUSE a try after the Unity forced my hand to leave Ubuntu but YaST felt way too heavy handed. Been using Linux Mint for a while now and I think I'll settle with Mint as long as they dont do "weird stuff". If they do, my next and last distro would be pure Debian.
Keyframe 11y ago
They didn't disappear, they changed name to Mandriva. Can't talk about other people, but I remember when it went about in popularity people that used linux already mostly deemed it as too windows-like for their taste. Me included. Windows people didn't like lack of applications they used and games. So it was in that weird limbo between two worlds where neither wanted to use it. Probably the greatest mistake was that they marketed it towards home/desktop users. Game somewhat changed with SUSE, at about the same time, that pushed their distro to corporate environments (and was helped by a fact that Linux himself used it quite often). Only a couple of years later (5-7) would we see Ubuntu and a bit larger array of desktop users applications which were around.
- deutronium 11y ago
  It looks like Mandriva shut down last year alas, according to Wikipedia.
- rijoja 11y ago
  Hm you're right about that. Also wasn't there a lot of people that thought qt wasn't open source enough. From what I recall there where some opposition against KDE for this reason. Shame really because it was quite neat.
  - Keyframe 11y ago
    Some opposition is how I would not describe almost a crusade against it :) QT got quite more liberal later.
- matt_morgan 11y ago
  The name change came as a result of the acq/merger with Conectiva, which was popular (in relative terms) in Brazil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conectiva https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conectiva
- mpol 11y ago
  I was a Mandrake user/developer back then too. The blue colors and cartoonlike icons turned off many people, though they didn't bother me. For years they were the most polished desktop distro. Then Ubuntu came, with some more abstract colors and icons, and they were all the craze suddenly (I never understood why, to this day). They always had problems financially. I don't think there was ever a good business-plan that worked. Sometimes Powerpacks, the MandrakeClub, and also donations. They were always on the brink of disaster. I think in the end the investors were tired and pulled the plug. They were quite big in France, in the military and governent departments. But apparently they don't pay as well as the US pays Red Hat. I still don't know any distro that has an installer that is as good as Mandrake's. And definitely no Mandrake Control Center thingie. Up to this day there is no equivalent to that. They had that nailed. (I do pity the almost yearly rewrites of those as management demanded, and the bugs that came from it). They were also the first distro with a list of pci id's and vendor id's, so drivers would be configured and loaded automatically. We now take it for granted, but this was non-existant on other distro's, you always had to meddle with modprobe.conf.

spystath 11y ago

Mandrake got me into Linux some 12 years ago and it was an excellent effort in general. Quite accessible to the new user and lots of documentation. I have also used briefly Mandriva back in the day before moving to Ubuntu. I believe Mageia is their successor of sorts.

zlatan_todoric 11y ago

Although never user nor developer of Mandrake (Debian dude here) I really appreciated their effort and work, they really did some astonishing in those days, I just really think they didn't have the luck to hit it in right time. They were really innovative and really tried to make user experience great even before PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, Mint, openSUSE and others tried that. While Mageia is there, they seem to have hard time to innovate and keep the pace, but I am still glad they are here.

ajdlinux 11y ago

Linux-Mandrake 7.2 was my first distribution. 14 years later, I'm now working full time in open source, and while I've been on the Debian side of the fence for a while now, I'm still using KDE! So thanks, Mandrake developers!

jhwhite 11y ago

Mandrake was my first Linux distro that I installed in 1999. I remember some friends warning me against Linux at all saying the install would fry my entire computer. I forged ahead and have ran Linux systems off and on from then until now.

jordigh 11y ago

Boy, what a world that was. When everyone took for granted that Linux was a business and there were several competing commercial Linux distributors. How the world has changed.

andrewclunn 11y ago

Anybody else decide to go to: http://www.placeforlinux.com/ http://www.placeforlinux.com/ after watching this?

rijoja 11y ago
I was tempted :)

finid 11y ago

Mandrake, which became Mandriva Linux, is history, but it lives on through ROSA Linux, Mageia and OpenMandriva. See http://linuxbsdos.com/category/rosa-desktop; http://linuxbsdos.com/category/rosa-desktop; http://linuxbsdos.com/category/mageia; http://linuxbsdos.com/category/mageia; and http://linuxbsdos.com/category/openmandriva http://linuxbsdos.com/category/openmandriva Mandrake Linux was the third distro I used, after Red Hat and Linux PowerPC 2000. Btw, I still have my 2-set Mandrake Linux 8.1 CD.

ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "it lives on through ROSA Linux, Mageia and OpenMandriva." ... and PCLinuxOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCLinuxOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCLinuxOS http://www.pclinuxos.com/ http://www.pclinuxos.com/
- finid 11y ago
  > ... and PCLinuxOS No, PCLinuxOS used to be based on Mandrake/Mandriva, but not any more.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    The same could be said for the rest of the distros listed. For example, ROSA Linux is now 'Independent' according to DistroWatch: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=rosa http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=rosa
    - finid 11y ago
      > ROSA Linux is now 'Independent' according to DistroWatch ROSA Linux and those I listed became "independent" because Mandriva went bust. PCLinuxOS forged it's own part while Mandriva was still active.
      - finid 11y ago
        That was supposed to be PATH, not "part".

colindean 11y ago

Fifteen-year-old me bought this circa 2001! There was a boxed product called "Linux for Windows" or something like that. It simply resized the Windows partition, installed Mandrake, and installed Grub or LILO (can't remember). I installed it on an old Dell Pentium 2 machine I had because I was scared that it would mess up the Windows ME partition on my Compaq P3 800. It wasn't the first time I'd used Linux -- that was Trustix over ssh -- but it was the first graphical distribution I'd tried. Earlier that summer, I'd (painstakingly over a 33 kbps connnection) downloaded Phatlinux, an early live CD distro. I couldn't run it on my Compaq for some reason, but I did get it to work on my aunt's computer. Phatlinux gave me a reason to investigate more and Mandrake let me do it. I think I used Mandrake on that machine until I discovered Red Hat in college (ca. 2003) and I switched to Ubuntu shortly after its first release in 2004.

fit2rule 11y ago

Didn't Yggdrasil do one of these, too? I seem to remember there were other distro TV ads, maybe it was the SLS guys ..