UGN Security Forums UGN Security: UGN Archives Open News MandrakeSoft files for bankruptcy

Linux distributor MandrakeSoft S.A. has filed for bankruptcy protection at a court in its home country of France, the company said Wednesday.

The company said a series of quarterly losses led to the filing of "declaration de cessation des paiements" but that current operations will continue including the release of version 9.1 of its software due in April.

MandrakeSoft posted a net loss of €6.1 million (US$6.0 million) on revenue of €4.7 million in the previous fiscal year, which ended in September 2002.

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Good. I hate mandrake. I hope they die.

now this is a very intelligent post...

I donno, I don't mind Mandrake too much, I like it more than redhat, eventhough its just a kiddie version of redhat lol... But I'd rather stay with Slackware or Debian .

Really? It wasn't supposed to be intelligent. Nice deduction there sherlock.

The post is suiting though for a 'mandrake' thread response, or at least I think so. Mandrake is like the retarded cousin of the linux family. They try to be over-user friendly in a market aimed towards computer scientists and programmers(not just userfreindly, big difference there). True its good for begginers and childrens first introduction to linux, but the simple fact stands that I don't like it and nothing will change my opinion. Just like I dont like grape jelly.

grape jelly is the best

Linux isn't for geeks only anymore. The time linux only was for geeks has already passed away for a long time. But still a lot of people think linux is a "nerd" only operating system. Altough you still need some intelligence to use it.

And explain to me, what is retarted about mandrake? The fact that they try to make linux userfriendly? Now what's wrong with that. And why should it be for beginners only?
If you don't like it, leave it alone, and use the "l33t" distro's, but don't moan about mandrake.

I do leave it alone. It's not my preference in distro's. They tried to make it a user friendly linux distro, and look they went bankrupt. There just isnt a market for userfriendly linux. It just doesent have the support and acceptance to be. Because no matter how hard you try to make it user friendly, It's just not. Sooner or later when you encounter a real problem our going to have to get down and dirty in some config file.

If it makes you happy I will never state my opinion again. Im sorry you have no sense of humor. It was meant as a joke, not "moaning".

Almost all of the linux distro's are making great losses, mandrake isn't an exeption.
Why shouldn't there be a market for a userfriendly linux? On schools for example as a replacement for windows. And mandrake is pretty userfriendly. And yes you can't change everything with menu's and clicking, but a normal computer user would never have to go into config files.

And i do have a sense of humor.

considering that OSX is based on the linux system - uses the linux kernel - I very much think linux CAN be user friendly AND marketable. There's nothing wrong with making the system user friendly. There's nothing wrong with making programming user-friendly (VB). There's nothing wrong with using microwaves instead of a campfire.

You are entitled to your opinion but you SHOULD also respect other people's opinions and viewpoints as well as see more than a biased view on something.

I like mandrake's distro. It installs quick and easy. I could use a more "1337" distro, but why? I just want some of the linux tools and toys. I like playing in the command line, setting up and wrecking a server. Why get something harder to install that dose the same [censored]?

If it dosen't hit the net.... What is the security risk? I think it is often frowned upon because it is user friendly. I have noticed many (I say many not refering to anyone) people around here say "[censored] windows use linux"

If you truely want linux to take over, or in anyway replace windows it will have to grow in many ways. One way is to make it more user friendly. More people will buy it and it will then continue to grow.

To anyone who "hates" Mandrake I challenge you to site specific reasons for hateing it. More than that give me some reasons that do not invole internet security for those not on the net.

Why do you care "why" I "hate" it. See, the fact is it tries to be user friendly when it't really isn't user friendly when it comes down to it. Sure you might have really colorful pretty menu's. But all the nice pictures give you a false sense of control. It's psuedo-userfriendliness. The fact it claims to natively support hardware it doesen't. I find their installer to be kind of buggy. I don't like the bundled software that comes with it. The colors it uses are unappealing to me. But see this is all just opinion. I know you use mandrake and you love it. Like I said before some people like grape jelly, some people don't. Hell, some people don't even like jelly. I don't hate windows either, I might have said it before out of momentary fury, but its great for entertainment(among other reasons).

Look, you want to challenge me to have an opinion? Theres a few reasons for you and not a one is internet security.

ROFL I knew you would say something like that. My post wasn't directed directly at you. It was directed at anyone saying Mandrake sucks. It dose have some bugs, but they are easy to work out actualy.

I'm not trying to change your opinion. Realy I'm not. I just wanted to shine a light of a different color before it turned into a

"Yea me too fest"

Any OS can be difficult. Hell even windows 9x has some advanced work if you realy wana keep your system running clean.

Anyway, Thanks for the feed back. Anyone else?

It wasn't directed at me? Yet, while were writing it you were thinking about what my reaction would be?

I deffinately see what your saying. With the impresionable people around here the next you know everyone will hate mandrake for no other reason than the saw someone elses opinion with no evidence of their own to back it up. This comes from my own experience with Mandrake. not to mention when I purchased a boxed version an entire CD was corrupted....
Maybe it's just my bad luck. I'm sure it has been fine for millions of other users. My opinion is based on my personal experiences with this OS not because of whether its '1337' or not.

Yea that would be enough to piss me off. What version did you buy? I bought 7.2 and 8.0 But down loaded 9.0

7.2 used GRUB as a boot loader and I had issues with it. 8.0 I had no problems with other that total n00b still. 9.0 is sleek sexy and I now know a considerable amout more than I did. Still consider myself a n00b untill I am modifying the kernel on my own. For that I need to learn C

Mandrake has a lot, and I mean a lot of security problems. In some cases there are just "some bugs", as �in_tax says, but in other cases there are huge problems, and it takes Mandrake Soft ages to come up with the patch required.

This article touches different subjects, and one of them is the (lack of) security in Mandrake.

To save you the pain of reading it (it's quite large) I'll give you some quotes :

- "There is exactly one person doing the updates (Vincent Danen)."

- "A known vulnerability to Mozilla (the most popular web browser in the Linux world) was allowed to sit in the queue for 6 months. Why you ask? Because Vincent didn't have the expertise to do a Mozilla update."

- "The maintainers for the packages don't maintain their packages. They toss them up there and forget about them once the version releases for the most part. No matter how dire the security threat, developers never put the priority on those updates. Nor does the Quality Assurance department."

- "The updates that get produced are supposed to be reviewed by QA. Often QA is slow or flat out too busy working on cooker to bother with security updates. Often updates get pushed out without QA approval because they've simply waited far too long and really need to be released. Even if QA does do any testing, they severely slow down the update release cycle. Opening more of a window for crackers to gain access to your machine running Mandrake."

- "Mandrake makes available downloads of ISOs. The ISOs contain the public keys that are used to validate the security updates that you download. Unfortunately, those ISOs are not signed with any key. So the ISOs that you download from all of the mirrors, which Mandrake does not control, could have modified versions of the ISO with an extra key."

This are just some points. I for one like Mandrake, for the efforts it made to make it user friendly, but I also agree with sinetific. It has some real security problems, and when it comes down to it, you have to get down and fix them yourself, and the userfriendly part will not help you.