Life on the bleeding edge

[Evan Leibovitch]

CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> Which one and how is it getting worse?
The GUI front end to urpmi that serves as the "software management"
component of Mandriva's Control Centre.

> They have more than one. I've always liked urpmi and thought it was a highly underrated package management system.
A few years ago, urpmi was truly best of class. Now, others have caught
up. The Kubuntu system, with its parallel downloads and an update
notification service in the KDE panel, is IMO clearly better.

> I can't fault the management of Mandriva for wanting to make money, especially in light of the company's near death experience couple of years ago.
The pulled out of bankruptcy using the old business model; now they just
strive to be a Red Hat wannabe. Now you need to buy a boxed set or a
paid Club membership just to have access to free-but-proprietary RPMs
such as winmodem drivers and Acrobat. I don't think Red Hat keeps those
packages away from Fedora.

> They are criticized if they don't make money and end up in  bankruptcy protection but then are criticized when they try to make  money by differentiating their free product from the product for which they charge money.
If the difference is that the paid version includes Acrobat, Flash and
the free version does not, that's hardly a differentiation. Withholding
free-as-in-beer software from the free version is dumb.

> They have always had versions that were not offered for free but the free version wasn't lacking anything that other free  distros offered.
>   
That's changed. If you don't have a paid club membership or a boxed set,
getting stuff as simple as Flash becomes an unnecessary pain.

>> By contrast, the commitment that there will only ever be one 
>> "level" of Ubuntu, identical for commercial or free use, offers
>> significant appeal. And the one feature that I liked best about
>> Mandriva at the time that Colin and I wrote the for the TuxMag
>> shootout a few months ago -- the PLF repository -- is now available
>> for Ubuntu.
>>     
>
> How long it will remain so is not clear. See: <http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-plf_discuss%40zarb.org/msg00084.html>.
>   
That mail just says they're looking for volunteers and the original
person has stepped down. I note that this URL is an email on the
"Ubuntu-PLF_discuss" mailing list.

> I have been a Mandrake/Mandriva user for years. Until a month ago, I was running it on my laptop, which I use as my primary development/working environment. I went through a flurry of trying different distros because Mandriva 2006 that I had been using on that machine for the last year didn't support an external LCD projector at all. Apparently, it was because twinhead support in the version of X  that shipped with 2006 was broken.
Ironically, I never had a problem with that on my Mandriva-equipped
Thinkpad T42. Just kept pressing Fn-F12 until the right combination of
output came up. To each their own, I guess :-)

> As for Gentoo, I have it running on a few servers.
I suspected it was great for that. What's it like on the desktop?

Thanks for the info.

- Evan

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