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The end for Mandriva
- baldfat 11y agoMandrake was the first Linux distro I attempted to install way back in the day. My first "Main Distro" was PC Linux which was Mandriva with a apt-get package manager for RPM fork. Sad day for all the old time Linux users.
- systems 11y agowell, there is mageia, which is very much alive and have been in the top 10 on distrowatch for as long as i can remember mageia is also community driven, which some consider an advantage over other distros driven by commercial organizations
- gh02t 11y agoMandrake was the first Linux distro I actually used for any period of time and I have fond memories of it. It was quite slick for someone who didn't really know what he was doing. My first attempt at Linux though was installing off of a full set of Debian Woody cds. I remember fondly booting up into an ancient version of KDE and feeling very pleased with my technical prowess. IIRC, I ended up torpedoing the bootloader and had no idea how to restore it and ended up wiping the drive. I cringe thinking about how easy it actually would have been to fix if I had known what I was doing.
- isaacdl 11y agoVery nostalgic! I remember downloading the two-CD Mandrake set using a "fast" internet connection at my dad's workplace. Took most of two days. Then I had to learn how to burn a CD. Then I had to learn what this "BIOS" thing is, and what it means to boot from CD. Then I clicked a bunch of buttons that I didn't understand. Then a bunch of weird text scrolled by on the screen, and then I was running Linux![1] Thanks for all the fun, Mandrake! [1] It wasn't till later that I discovered that clicking random buttons has a tendency to wipe out other operating systems on the hard drive. Like my parents' Win98 installation. Whoops...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 2close4comfort 11y agoMandrake was my first distro as well...this does make me kind of sad to see it end this way. That is really too bad.
- jestinjoy1 11y agoI started my Linux journey with Mandriva. At that time, compared to Redhat Linux, Mandriva had better user interface and could play mp3. Now I use Debian. Sad to see the end of the road for Mandriva
- webtards 11y agoSad to see it all go. Still have the old Mandrake boxes knocking around somewhere. I recall it being installed, under the radar, in one London financial company, as a desktop for a trader to build out some modelling and pricing tools. This was their first linux box - all other nix boxes back then were either sun or hp-ux. Happy times.
- amyjess 11y agoLike many others, I got into Linux through Mandrake in 2003. I've long since moved on (I'm an Arch user now, after a very long stint using Gentoo), and the MDK community lives on in Mageia, but it's still kinda sad to see the company go.
- intsunny 11y agoRIP Mandrake/Mandriva. This distro was the first to give the Linux world automatic hardware detection and module loading. This distro was also the first to provide RPM a viable alternative to `apt-get` with `urpmi`. What we take for granted today were once engineering marvels for Linux newbies everywhere.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- 0x4a42 11y agoThe company Mandriva SA may be closing today but they stopped developping the Mandriva Linux distro in 2012. It is since called OpenMandriva and is managed by a non profit organization. So there's no reason for the Linux distro to die with its once eponym mother company. See https://www.openmandriva.org/ https://www.openmandriva.org/
- raverbashing 11y agoOn the subject of apt-get/urpmi I'm really disappointed how it seems RH adopted the worse of all options: yum. Today it is not so bad, but it was awful, in the beginnings of Fedora.
- mgkimsal 11y agoOne of the things I liked most about urpmi was that it would deal with package names that were close enough if there was no obvious conflict. > urpmi packagea even if the package was actually PackageA or packageA
- DrJokepu 11y agoYum is actually being replaced by dnf, which is a heavily modified fork of yum and it's supposedly much better.
- amyjess 11y agoWhat's even better is that dnf uses ZYpp's solver. IIRC, it was created as a compromise between people who wanted Fedora to move entirely to ZYpp and people who wanted to maintain compatibility with yum's APIs.
- willejs 11y agoMandrake was one of my first linux distros as well. It was a pretty exciting step up from slackware for me back then. A shame that its the end.
- finnjohnsen2 11y agoThanks for participating in the distro war. Without any participation to the war, we wouldn't have the battle proven distros we have today.
- gtk40 11y agoIf I understand it, Mandriva "lives on" in Mageia: http://www.mageia.org/en/ http://www.mageia.org/en/
- moondowner 11y agoYes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mageia#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mageia#History
- baldfat 11y agoAlso lives on as Openmadriva https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-is-going-out-and-openmandriva https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-i...
- fit2rule 11y agoI moved over to Mandrake after Yggdrasil bit the dust (with a short Debian stint in between) and ran it as my main OS for years .. but tried Ubuntu one fateful day and haven't used anything but Ubuntu since. So its a sad day to see Mandriva leave the scene .. they were doing really good and necessary things for us Linux devotees in the early days, and they deserve their place in the Linux Distro War history books. Pouring one out for you today, fella's ..
- theophrastus 11y agoah Yggdrasil! I used to get the full updates as a data CD (with fun cover art) stuck between the tech books of my local University's bookstore; because the download over dialup would've been prohibitive. ok... next nostalgic old fart can top that with leased Darpa 10Base2 lines.
- fit2rule 11y agoHeh .. I remember the first time I booted Ygdrassil .. it came with a floppy, and a CD. Man that was a great adventure, waiting 20 minutes on my 386-16megs for X to load. My, how far we've come .. good times, eh?
- Johnny_Brahms 11y agoHaving to fear borking your monitor by setting the wrong hz is not something I miss. The fantastic feeling when stuff actually worked is something else though. I feel I have gotten spoiled. Just now I had to spend 10 minutes fixing the system tray icon of pidgin under kde5. No satisfaction when it worked, just annoyance.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mawburn 11y agoThe Screen Savers on TechTV talked me into installing Mandrake when I was 16/17. I paid around $60 for the 7 CD installation disks at Best Buy. I really had no idea what I was doing and just used it to play Mahjong. RIP
- guizzy 11y agoMandrake was my second linux distro after a thankfully brief tangle with Caldera Linux (yeah, I know). Although I have very few good memories of Mandrake (made me discover why the term RPM-hell existed), it's still sad to see one of the big distros disappearing. I've moved after that to Debian-based distros, and eventually to Slackware, and now I'm trying to get myself back into the linux game with CentOS/Red Hat, but I'll always remember Mandrake as my first not completely sucky distro.
- ciriarte 11y agoAlmost my same story. I still remember trying to learn as much as possible from the magazines, downloading a full distro with my connection was unthinkable back then. It was back when I lived in Mexico. I find it very interesting how technology enabled people growing in different backgrounds to share the same experience.
- dandrews 11y agoCOL did have support for NetWare, which made it possible for me to swing to Linux when IBM lost interest in OS/2.
- MicroBerto 11y agoWow, such memories here. Back in my teens, Mandrake was the first distro that actually worked for me and helped me start to understand Linux. I was working at an ISP back then, variations of Unix everywhere, and had to get into Perl coding for a task. Having Linux on my machine seemed like a great place to start, and Mandrake was the one that installed best on my hardware. I still go back and forth as to whether it was ultimately worth it for me to get into Linux (time-wise) -- I probably would have been better off focusing on entrepreneurial efforts than not-so-necessary techie stuff -- but at the end of the day, learning Linux has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in managed hosting fees and contractor rates alone. Knowledge of Linux also been a clear difference-maker in nearly any technical job interview I've ever had, so I suppose it was worth it at the time for sure. RIP Mandrake, and thanks to anyone who helped make that project possible.
- potatomato 11y agoCounterpoint: Mandrake was the first distro I installed as a child -- but it was very broken. I picked an 'RC' (IIRC, RC1) because the version number was bigger and I didn't know what RC stood for.
- jedmeyers 11y agoSame here. As I remember Russian website/magazine xakep.ru (rus. 'хакер' - hacker) had an awesome guide on how to install and configure the Mandrake distro.
- jerf 11y agoOh, well, don't feel bad... the non-RC versions were also plenty broken back in the day. Play word association with me and hand me "buggy Linux distro" and you'll get back "Mandrake". And I've played with a lot of Linux distros since then.... (This is way back, like, less than a major version after it forked from Red Hat. The first thing they did was put all the latest newest pretty shiny in to the distro. This had the expected effect on stability, unfortunately. And Linux has come a long way, as has everything else despite our occasional complaints... "expected effects on stability" == "hard hangs". Back then, "hard hangs" tended to encompass disk corruption pretty frequently too, even if you didn't go with the latest & greatest filesystem, which was actually "slightly faster but much buggier than ext2", which itself was not necessarily great. My goodness, we really have come far....)
- nkjoep 11y agoRIP Mandriva! I installed it in my desktop many years ago and used as a gateway for internet sharing at home.
- LordKano 11y agoMandrake/Mandriva was my favorite distro for over 10 years. My introduction to Linux came with Red Hat 4.2, it was very cool but my limited knowledge at the time made certain things difficult for me. Next, I used Red Hat 5.0 and I liked that a lot but what really changed things for me was Mandrake 6.0. That distribution got me excited about digging into Linux and GNU to find out how things worked and how to customize things to my liking. URPMI addresses so many of the issues with RPM that I was hooked. No more RPM dependency hell. I finally switched from Mandriva to something else in 2009. It was great, in its day.
- pjmlp 11y agoLike many already mentioned, Mandrake was the first distro to offer proper hardware detection to my computers. Also being compiled for i586 architecture was a big plus to me back then, as I wanted to take advantage of my Pentium processors.
- agentultra 11y agoMandrake was my first exposure to Linux. My hats off to Mandriva for keeping it going for so long.
- dvirsky 11y agoMandrake was my first distro as well, haven't used it in ~14 years I guess. I remember downloading it over a 56k modem that kept disconnecting at night and when I was at work, it took about a week! Sadly, I knew no Linux users in person. But it was totally worth it. I can still remember the sense of adventure first installing and running Linux. And then I installed some dev tools, and it was like this OS was calling me to write code. I started to code and haven't stopped since...
- mod 11y agoI actually bought Mandrake at the store, Office Max I believe. First linux I could get to work with my video card--after a couple of weeks trying with redhat. Sound was another story--I don't think I got it working. ~15 years ago, I think.
- dvirsky 11y agoI actually switched to RedHat a few weeks or months later, I can't recall exactly why, and I do have some memories of playing music with XMMS on those first distros.
- mod 11y agoI ended up in Debian not too long after, and spent ~5 years there. Wouldn't have made it that far without Mandrake, I don't think.
- Chmouel 11y agoI was the first (or second depend of the point of view) employee of Mandriva back in 1999, quite a journey since then. Sad to see them gone
- mratzloff 11y agoAny interesting stories?
- ruda 11y agoI used to work at Conectiva in 1999 and I remember to look at Mandrake/Mandriva spec files, I did remember your contributions (also from Pablo). Good old days. Later both companies get merged. Respect.
- guhcampos 11y agoGood times. Conectiva 6.1 was my first contact with Linux, after a workshop in UFMG. I was a kid back then and got completely hooked by that "grown up thing". Then I spent too many sleepless nights trying to patch the Kernel to work in my cheap PC and its PC Chips motherboard with an integrated WinModem. And that headache got me every single job I ever had after that =D
- bbgm 11y agoLooks like Mandrake was the first Linux distro for a lot of people. Back in the late 90s early 00s I spent all my days in front of a bunch of SGI workstations, and wanted something at home with a desktop UI that worked but still gave me all the wonderful *nix features I was used to. Mandrake was the first distro that kind of did that. It was relatively easy to install and the windowing environment was mostly familiar. It had a lot of warts but they felt worthwhile at the time. RIP!
- baldfat 11y agoTitle Misleading: Mandriva was last released by Madriva SA was 2012 and was moved to OpenMandriva with a independent community. https://www.openmandriva.org/ https://www.openmandriva.org/ Mandriva SA closing has zero impact on OpenMadriva https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-is-going-out-and-openmandriva https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-i...
- corbet 11y agoAnd the title (which I wrote) said nothing about OpenMandriva — which, as far as I can tell, isn't moving along at any great pace anyway.
- baldfat 11y agoTo be fair to you I didn't know the last 3 or 4 years of Mandriva history and what had happened. In May 2012 Mandriva the company abandoned development of Mandriva and transfered leadership, resources and the forums to OpenManadriva. http://blog.mandriva.com/en/2012/05/17/mandriva-linux-will-return-to-the-community/ http://blog.mandriva.com/en/2012/05/17/mandriva-linux-will-r... (The link is broken since it was hosted by Mandriva)
- Nelson69 11y agothe spinning up of OpenMandriva has to be a textbook example of how to do it wrong. The relevance had petered off pretty dramatically by that time. Seems the owners and possibly even the courts running the various administrations didn't recognize that part of the value. Should OpenMandriva have been started like in 2002 or so, the landscape could look different now.
- baldfat 11y agoMageia forked successfully than the OpenMandriva happened when all the energy left the camp.
- WaxProlix 11y ago
- iovar 11y agoI remember buying the official edition of Mandrake 10.0, while my previous experience was only with Slackware. It was so easy to install that I completely stopped using Windows, ever since. Truth is though, that for me it died right about when it became Mandriva and Ubuntu was the new shinny distro, that wasn't only easy to install but it'd sent the disks right to your home. Rip Mandrake and thanks.
- Frondo 11y agoI used Mandriva for my work laptop for a long, long time, until they first ran into problems (2010 was it?). When the Mandriva community reformed around the Mageia distro (http://mageia.org http://mageia.org), I switched to that, and I've been a totally satisfied Mageia user ever since. Mageia is the linux I recommend, because these days I only recommend linux to non-technical users, and it's the only one that works so reliably. I joke about how I've basically forgotten how to tweak Linux on the command line, since with Mageia you don't need to, but it's not really a joke. Everything "just works."
- acheron 11y agoMandrake was my first successful Unix-like experience as well - I had spend a few days trying to get Red Hat to work at one point, but it never did (video card drivers were the issue IIRC). Mandrake actually worked and let me play around with it. I dual booted it for awhile but it didn't really catch on with me; nonetheless it was an important first experience. (Later a friend convinced me to install FreeBSD and I took to that much better. I avoided Linux for years after that in favor of BSD, though eventually I moved to Debian for most cases. Keep being tempted to go back to FreeBSD though...)
- carrja99 11y agoMandrake was one of the first distros that I ever got to work on a laptop correctly. I'm shedding some nostalgic tears here!
- apo 11y agoMandrake was the first distro that allowed me to reliably connect my audio modem, my video card, and my sound card. It was my go-to OS for a long time after that. It's easy to forget just how challenging hardware support for Linux used to be.
- babuskov 11y agoMandrake 7 was the Linux distro that made me switch away from Windows. I used Windows 98 at the time and did not like XP much. Although there was lot to be desired, it worked much better than Win98, so I made the switch and never looked back since. As I learned more about Linux I switched later to Slackware which I'm still using to this day (with Ubuntu on second and MacOSX on third computer I'm using daily).
- TallGuyShort 11y agoI somehow ended up with a manual for Mandriva long before I had a machine of my own or that someone would let me install Linux on - I read it thoroughly hoping to learn everything I could about *nix. I never did end up using Mandriva, but it still feels like my first distribution... Sad, in a way, to see it end.
- filmgirlcw 11y agoLike so many others, Mandrake was one of my first distros back in 1998, 1999. When I worked at the Electronics Boutique, it was one of the three Linux distros you could buy in a box at our store (the other was Red Hat and the third was Corel Linux I think). Memories. Shame the company is over but I'm glad the OSS part moved on a few years ago.
- kriro 11y agoInteresting. I hadn't followed them but it seems like they had quite a few enterprisy things that looked decent at first glance back in ~2006 when I last checked them out. Seems like that's what they were pushing for then, guess it didn't pay off. Pretty sad to see them go. One of the original five distributions I tried when I had 0 clue (SUSE, Debian, Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake roughly in that order).
- arihant 11y agoWow, my Mandrake 7.1 user manual just became a collectible. Easy to forget little things, but a lot of people my age would not become computer scientists without Mandrake, RedHat and Knoppix.
- raikage 11y agoRIP Mandrake, used Mandrake 7.x to 10, fond memories of users spending a lot of time playing clanbomber. Loved urpmi, lots of installable games (compared to Redhat that time) and Multi Network Firewall (MNF) edition.
- ajdlinux 11y agoLinux-Mandrake 7.2 was the first distribution I successfully installed and used as a primary OS. All of the memories :( (I may have abandoned the RPM world for Debian, but it was Mandrake that got me using KDE back in the 2.0 days - it's now 2015 and I'm still a KDE user!)
- endgame 11y agoEven though I didn't use it for long, Mandrake was one of my first distros as well. Lossless resizing of FAT32 partitions seemed like magic at the time.