Mandriva!

[tragic]

For those of you that haven't heard, Mandrake is no longer. The MandrakeSoft team have decided to go with Mandriva as their new name. They aren't chaning the OS, and it's not important or anything, but still... cool.

[dragonxx4]

I wonder why they changed the name. Bummer, I think I liked Mandrake better.

[rightcoast]

Yeah Mandrake lost a lawsuit to the Hearst Corporation over the name Mandrake, even without the merger a namechange was likely imminent.

But as far as Hearst (Parent Corp of King Features Syndicate), TM or no TM, it was a really lame lawsuit. Like anyone confuses the software company Mandrakesoft with some comic from the 40's. The lawsuit was about their copyright on this character. Mandrake the Magician.

EDIT:The new name is pretty bad, anything would have been better, even Connectidrake. Although they missed a good chance to go with a completely different, good name. Why do some megers insist on going with some lame name hybrid?

[LocoCoyote]

First FakeDora (Fendora...whatever) now this! Are all these Redhat based distros going through an identity crisis?

;-)

[ComputerNut]

Originally Posted by rightcoast The new name is pretty bad, anything would have been better, even Connectidrake. Although they missed a good chance to go with a completely different, good name. Why do some megers insist on going with some lame name hybrid?

To me, a name is a name, if the OS is quality, I wont lose sleep at night if the name sucks. Just as long as I can properly use the name to identify which linux im dealing with, the name could say pumpernickel for all I care

Just my 2 cents.
CN

[rightcoast]

I fully agree with you ComputerNut, Since I am not associated with the company nor do I like Mandrake much, I'm in your camp on this one. It doesn't really affect me at all. But, I still think that a good, strong name, ala Red Hat or Debian, has got to help draw people in. I'm not in marketing so I could be way of here, but why else would companies put so much effort into choosing names?

I still say that name sounds like the star of a drag show, Man Diva

[ComputerNut]

Originally Posted by rightcoast I still say that name sounds like the star of a drag show, Man Diva

Actually I think it sounds like it could be the name of some latin samba song or something. LOL

CN

[rightcoast]

It had been a long time since I tried Mandrake, I think I used 9.2 for a minute, but I am not sure if it was even earlier.

I decided to try it out and got a hold of Mandriva Limited Edition 2005, it's only availible on the installation tree right now though.

I thought I would give a real short review.

It was real nice graphically, I only used gnome and left kde off for my install though. It recognized everything, and it was the first time I didn't need to do anything but click for a Linux install. Not highly configurable, but very, very easy for someone new to Linux to transition with. If you have successfully installed Gentoo or something like it, the lack of customization will cause irritation to....emerge...lol, sorry for the pun.

In less than an hour I had it installed, had installed urpmi package manager, (Which BTW is good. Not quite up to apt-get snuff, but really good.) and installed drakwizard which I used to configure proftpd. Making it the simplest ftp server I ever set up, hands down. It doesn't come with some of the network and security tools i like, but with urpmi, it is a simple "urpmi netcat" or "urpmi whois".

The simplicity was only trumped by Xandros IMO, everything was equal except for Samba sharing. Which Xandros did a better job of making easy for people who have never done so. But it ::is:: kind hard to be easier than "automatic samba" or whatever it is really called, like Xandros has.

All in all a great distro, and they have done a good job, regardless of the new name

[mairving]

I've been thinking about suing Slackware since I have been a Slacker for years.