The end for Mandriva

http://lwn.net/Articles/645862/rss

by dimitar • 11 years ago

236 73 11 years ago

lwn.net

baldfat6• 11 years ago

Mandrake 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• 11 years ago

well, 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• 11 years ago

Mandrake 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• 11 years ago

Very 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...

2close4comfort• 11 years ago

Mandrake 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• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Sad 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.

amyjess2• 11 years ago

Like 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• 11 years ago

RIP 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.

0x4a42• 11 years ago

The 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/

raverbashing• 11 years ago

On 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• 11 years ago

One 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• 11 years ago

Yum is actually being replaced by dnf, which is a heavily modified fork of yum and it's supposedly much better.

twothamendment• 11 years ago

Mandrake was my second distro. I started with Red Hat, but when I got a new video card Mandrake supported it and RH didn't. I only had dial up so I bought a CD and waited for it to come in the mail. Those were the days.

willejs• 11 years ago

Mandrake 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• 11 years ago

Thanks for participating in the distro war. Without any participation to the war, we wouldn't have the battle proven distros we have today.

gtk40• 11 years ago

If I understand it, Mandriva "lives on" in Mageia: http://www.mageia.org/en/

moondowner• 11 years ago

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mageia#History

baldfat6• 11 years ago

Also lives on as Openmadriva https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-i...

fit2rule2• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

ah 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.

fit2rule2• 11 years ago

Heh .. 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?

mawburn• 11 years ago

The 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

mjcohen• 11 years ago

I fondly remember TechTV.

Then G4 took it over and absolutely destroyed it. A tragedy (at least to me).

guizzy• 11 years ago

Mandrake 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• 11 years ago

Almost 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• 11 years ago

COL did have support for NetWare, which made it possible for me to swing to Linux when IBM lost interest in OS/2.

MicroBerto• 11 years ago

Wow, 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• 11 years ago

Counterpoint: 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• 11 years ago

Same 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• 11 years ago

Oh, 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....)

marpstar• 11 years ago

I actually bought Mandrake on CD at Staples back circa 2001 and so began my first frustrations with Linux and device driver availability. Finding a dial-up modem that had an all-hardware chipset was easier said than done back then.

nichochar• 11 years ago

I was lucky enough to work with François Bancilhon, who was CEO of Mandriva for about 6 years https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23410 (I worked with him at Data-Publica).

He was an incredibly smart and cultivated man, and it makes me sad to see Mandriva go down, it was a beautiful and successful project (at least for a while).

I am very thankful for all the hard work people put in these fantastic projects

bootload• 11 years ago

"I was lucky enough to work with François Bancilhon, who was CEO of Mandriva for about 6 years https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23410 (I worked with him at Data-Publica)."

Indeed you were lucky. Mandriva really was a great distro. I started using it in 2005/2006 and with gnome bridged the gap in terms of usability and ease of use. You can see it in use here:

- https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/117923430/

The thing that killed my enthusiasm, was cost then the usability started getting in the way. Historicy buffs will geek out on the fact I started using Mandriva at the same time as I found Aarons python framework, web.py [0]. Up till three months ago, the lessons I learned using Mandriva and webpy allowed me to hack 200 lines of python and run it as my blog on Google AppEngine for a measly $USD10/year from 2007 to 2015.

- https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/88347878

Not long after that I switched to a new distro called Ubuntu. They even mailed the disks, at no cost.

- https://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/115063638/

Long live Mandriva.

[0] http://webpy.org/ and http://www.aaronsw.com/

nilved• 11 years ago

Haha. For me, Mandrake was the first distro I broke my computer with, around age 12. I wasn't allowed around the computer for a few months, but I did learn a lot about bootloaders.

wfn• 11 years ago

Huh this is very close to what happened to me - I had once installed Mandrake alongside Windows on my parents' PC some time in the middle school years, and it failed to install itself fully, but it was quick to put the bootloader (LILO, remember that one?) on the MBR. Naturally the LILO config entry for Windows had the wrong partition number or something I don't remember, and Windows wouldn't start anymore.

Mandrake on the other hand had a jolly half-installed X11 windows system which failed to bootstrap itself, leaving me with a nice command line prompt (a good learning experience to say the least.) I think I screwed around with `vi` before my dad called in his friend who worked in software. (Said software friend tried editing LILO config before realizing Mandrake would start in read-only-mode by default (chrooting was something quite alien he didn't work with Linux anyway)), and so he proceeded to use the default partition editor on an MS-DOS floppy disk. Lo and behold said partition editor only works with disks that are 32 GB or smaller. Ours was 40 GB. Partition table borked.

We eventually got it all back. Good experience. I learned about the existence of virtual machines on the desktop (and doing experiments there) right after. :)

LordKano• 11 years ago

Mandrake/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• 11 years ago

Like 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• 11 years ago

Mandrake was my first exposure to Linux.

My hats off to Mandriva for keeping it going for so long.

dvirsky2• 11 years ago

Mandrake 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...

mod2• 11 years ago

I 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.

dvirsky2• 11 years ago

I 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.

Chmouel• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Any interesting stories?

ruda• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Good 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• 11 years ago

Looks 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!

baldfat6• 11 years ago

Title Misleading: Mandriva was last released by Madriva SA was 2012 and was moved to OpenMandriva with a independent community. https://www.openmandriva.org/

Mandriva SA closing has zero impact on OpenMadriva https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-i...

corbet• 11 years ago

And 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.

baldfat6• 11 years ago

To 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-r... (The link is broken since it was hosted by Mandriva)

WaxProlix• 11 years ago

Odd that so many people in the comments (and at the top, indicating consensus) seem to share in some of GP's confusion.

iovar• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

I 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), 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."

carrja99• 11 years ago

Mandrake was one of the first distros that I ever got to work on a laptop correctly. I'm shedding some nostalgic tears here!

acheron• 11 years ago

Mandrake 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...)

apo• 11 years ago

Mandrake 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• 11 years ago

Mandrake 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• 11 years ago

I 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• 11 years ago

Like 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• 11 years ago

Interesting. 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• 11 years ago

Wow, 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• 11 years ago

RIP 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• 11 years ago

Linux-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• 11 years ago

Even 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.

The end for Mandriva

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