
The end for Mandriva - dimitar
http://lwn.net/Articles/645862/rss
======
MicroBerto
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
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.

~~~
jerf
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....)

------
baldfat
Title 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-i...](https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-
is-going-out-and-openmandriva)

~~~
corbet
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.

~~~
baldfat
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...](http://blog.mandriva.com/en/2012/05/17/mandriva-linux-will-return-
to-the-community/) (The link is broken since it was hosted by Mandriva)

~~~
Nelson69
the 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
Mageia forked successfully than the OpenMandriva happened when all the energy
left the camp.

------
intsunny
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.

~~~
raverbashing
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.

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

~~~
amyjess
What'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.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
> What's even better is that dnf uses ZYpp's solver.

What is sad though, is that it does not output CUDF, which would allow using
other solvers.

------
mawburn
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
I fondly remember TechTV.

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

------
baldfat
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.

~~~
isaacdl
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...

------
dvirsky
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...

~~~
mod
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.

~~~
dvirsky
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.

~~~
mod
I 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.

------
gtk40
If I understand it, Mandriva "lives on" in Mageia:
[http://www.mageia.org/en/](http://www.mageia.org/en/)

~~~
baldfat
Also lives on as Openmadriva
[https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-i...](https://forums.openmandriva.org/en/discussion/987/mandriva-
is-going-out-and-openmandriva)

------
finnjohnsen2
Thanks for participating in the distro war. Without any participation to the
war, we wouldn't have the battle proven distros we have today.

------
Chmouel
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

~~~
ruda
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
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

------
TallGuyShort
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.

------
amyjess
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.

------
acheron
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...)

------
pjmlp
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.

------
guizzy
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
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.

------
fit2rule
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
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.

~~~
fit2rule
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?

~~~
Johnny_Brahms
Having 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.

------
webtards
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.

------
Frondo
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](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."

------
apo
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.

------
agentultra
Mandrake was my first exposure to Linux.

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

------
LordKano
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.

------
jestinjoy1
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

------
bbgm
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!

------
kriro
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).

------
babuskov
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).

------
iovar
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.

------
filmgirlcw
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.

------
ajdlinux
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!)

------
raikage
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.

------
arihant
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.

------
endgame
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.

------
willejs
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.

------
carrja99
Mandrake was one of the first distros that I ever got to work on a laptop
correctly. I'm shedding some nostalgic tears here!

