Health Check: Mandriva - By Richard Hillesley

Catch a falling star

By Richard Hillesley
11 March 2010
Source

Mandriva began life in July 1998 as Linux Mandrake in France in Gael Duval's bedroom after he ported a KDE 1.0 desktop onto Red Hat Linux 5.1, uploaded the result onto two FTP servers, went away on holiday, and came back to find that he had a popular and successful Linux distribution on his hands.

KDE 1.0 had just been released (12 July, 1998), but Red Hat had yet to include the desktop environment because of reservations about the licensing of the Qt C++ cross platform GUI toolkit, on which KDE was built.

Duval not only included the latest version of KDE, but added touches of his own such as making "access to the CD-ROM and Floppy drives transparent (e.g. no need to mount disks by typing "mount /dev/...")." When Duval returned from his two week holiday there were more than two hundred messages waiting for him, "including new ideas, one patch, and two companies (located in the US and Australia) announcing that they had already started selling Mandrake on CDs."

The combination of Red Hat and KDE proved a winning combination for Linux Mandrake, and began a roller coaster ride for Mandrake/Mandriva and its developers that has continued to this day.

The Kool aid acid test

The choice of KDE was the first momentous step for Mandrake. The Kool Desktop Environment, later known as the K Desktop environment and even later just as KDE, had been launched by Matthias Ettrich with an announcement on de.comp.os.linix.misc in October 1996.

KDE was revolutionary in its time because it was the first attempt to create a truly integrated desktop environment for Unix-like operating systems. Ettrich was a student and lead developer on the LyX project which brought a "what you see is what you mean" (WYSIWYM) front end to LaTeX, and became interested in the wider problem of developing a coherent and accessible desktop for Linux after installing Linux on his girlfriend's computer.

Linux had a variety of window managers, but no comprehensive toolkit for the development of applications with a common look and feel. For Ettrich, the Qt libraries, developed by Trolltech of Norway, were the answer to the problem. But the use of Qt as a framework for KDE became the source of yet another problem.

Qt was open source in the sense that the code was visible, but the license wasn't approved or compatible with the GPL. Since nearly all KDE applications were written under the GPL, this meant that the applications were in violation of their own licences.

A legacy to all humanity

Miguel de Icaza, at that time a rising star of the free software movement and co-creator, with Federica Mena, of the rival GNOME project, expressed the mixed feelings of many users and developers. "KDE was an inspirational project," he told Linux Journal, "but at the time, the Qt toolkit on which KDE was built was a proprietary toolkit."

"It was a disgrace," he lamented, "that everyone in the community had worked so hard to create a fully open-source desktop (a legacy to all humanity) that we would give up in the end because of the lack of a free toolkit."

Ettrich took a more pragmatic approach. "For the success of KDE, a stable, controlled basis class library was an important factor," he said in 1998. "It could have been an open source one, of course, if one was available. We in the KDE team wanted to write free software."

GNOME was sponsored by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as a response to the problems around Qt, and was based on the Gtk toolkit developed by Peter Mathis and Spencer Kimball for GIMP, but Ettrich felt that Qt was the better option. "Gtk+ is an impressive and very complete toolkit. If only it was written in C++, the decision between Qt and Gtk would have been really hard. As it is now, Qt programming is much easier, requires less code and feels more natural."

Qt later went through a variety of license changes, and the issues between KDE, which had been the subject of a protracted flame war, and the free and open source software community, have long since been resolved.

Red Hat Linux never used KDE as its default desktop, choosing instead to go with GNOME, which left the door open for Duval and Mandrake.

Catch a falling star

Mandrake quickly became the most successful desktop Linux of its day, the Linux distribution that offered the most for the home user, the hobbyist or adventurer looking for a friendly and practical alternative to Windows, easy to install, easy to configure, and easy to use. The first release was numbered 5.1, after the Red Hat release it was based on.

By the end of 1998 Duval had founded MandrakeSoft with Frederic Bastok and Jacques Le Marois, with the objective of developing the commercial potential of Mandrake through the provision of packaged versions of GNU/Linux and related support services. In May 1999 Mandraksoft signed an agreement with MacMillan Software, now the Pearson Technology Group, which proceeded to base a widely available Linux product range on Linux Mandrake, giving Mandrakesoft access to a vast distribution network in the US.

Mandrake, which had apparently risen from nowhere in a few short months, quickly became the most popular Linux distribution for home users, not least because it consistently presented a friendly and helpful face to the world, and had angled its content towards the desktop user, whereas others had looked towards the more obvious rewards of the server market.

The upsurge in interest in Linux during the late 1990s brought a new emphasis on usability and accessibility, and much of the impetus for the simplified installation and control of Linux systems had come from Mandrakesoft - who maintained an ethical relationship with the developer communities, releasing the tools it developed for installation, updates, configuration and hardware identification under the GPL.

The added value of Mandrake came from the wealth of point and click configuration tools that came with the distribution. Mandrake tackled the problems that were familiar to home users - dynamic partitioning, printer and terminal configuration - and came up with solutions that Windows users could understand, at a time when installing Linux was still intimidating for less experienced users.

Besides the standard desktop, MandrakeSoft expanded its services to include gaming, firewall and server editions of Mandrake, and a full range of consultation, support and training services for business. The distribution won numerous awards, and in November 1999 was nominated an "Innovative Company" by the prestigious French National Association for the Development of Research (ANVAR).

Tell me where all past years are

Mandrake was the Ubuntu of its day, and it seemed its run of good decisions and good fortune could never end. Mandrake was aimed at the home desktop users market. Linux was on the rise, and Mandrake was gaining users by the day.

As early as August 1999, MacMillan was claiming that its sales of Linux, based on Mandrake, accounted for 52% of Linux retail sales in the United States, and despite being based in Paris, more than 70% of Mandrakesoft's own sales were in the United States.

But the rise of Mandrake coincided with the dotcom boom, and it could be argued that its rapid growth was also the cause of its relative downfall during later years. Mandrake continued to top the distrowatch charts every year until 2004, the year Ubuntu came on the scene and times were changing.

Mandrake faced the problem that other makers of desktop versions of Linux have faced - selling an operating system in a box is not a sufficient business model unless you can sustain it with support agreements. Broadband was becoming ubiquitous in the markets where Mandrake was strong, and those users who once bought Linux in a box could now download an ISO or get it free with a magazine. Mandrakesoft's costs were rising as it expanded to fulfil the demand, opening an office in Los Angeles, and recruiting programmers to sustain the pace of change, but revenues didn't grow to match.

In July 2001, MandrakeSoft entered the Paris Euronext free market (Marche Libre), the French equivalent of an IPO, with an initial offering of 688,480 shares representing 20.28% of the company's capital, in a bid to raise funds, but by the end of 2002 was admitting that it faced serious cash problems, and began looking for new sources of income.

Such was the depth of Mandrakesoft's problems that the company posted a call to action from its users. "If you are concerned about MandrakeSoft's future, this is the time to mobilise," it said, and asked users to pay a subscription to Mandrakeclub, by which they could gain access to more software, quicker downloads and special promotions.

In January 2003, Mandrakesoft had to file for "declaration de cessation des paiements", the French equivalent of Bankruptcy Protection, but had recovered sufficiently by March 2004 to reach an agreement with the courts whereby liabilities of 4.1 million euros (roughly equivalent to 5 million US dollars) would be repaid to creditors over a nine-year period.

Mandrakesoft's profits for the fourth quarter of 2003 were 270,000 euros on revenue of 1.42 million euros for that quarter, which was a remarkable turn around for a company that had failed to post a profit since 1999.

Get with child a mandrake root

Mandrake's bad fortune wasn't limited to problem with its finances, but also grew to embrace the origins of its name.

The sixteenth century poet John Donne had written a song that began: Go and catch a falling star/ Get with child a mandrake root. The shooting star became the logo for Linux Mandrake, and Duval's distro of 1998 was named after the magical properties of the mandrake root, but John Donne had not been the inspiration for either the logo or the name.

In an interview in 2002 Duval claimed that he had "wanted a word that recalled the 'K' in KDE because the first Mandrake was based on KDE. Mandrake was a good option because it's a simple and efficient word, and describes a plant with supernatural properties."

Maybe it was a coincidence or lack of forethought, but the Mandrake developers went on to choose a magician's wand and top hat as emblems for Mandrake's configurability. Unfortunately, Mandrake the Magician was already a well known comic book character created by Lee Falk in the thirties, who was sometimes said to be "the first costumed superhero" because he wore the cape and coat of a stage magician as he went into battle with the forces of evil.

The coincidence of the name of Mandrake and Mandrakesoft's choice of a magician to cast a spell over its users was too much for the Hearst Corporation, the owners of King Features Syndicate, who owned the trademark on Mandrake the Magician, the comic book character. And though Mandrake Linux was not a comic book character nor a wand waving superhero and could not be confused with anything other than a Linux distribution, the coincidence of the name, the wand and top hat, was enough for King Features to contend that Mandrakesoft was infringing its trademark.

Mandrakesoft lost the case in the French courts and appealed the decision, but lost again when it was pointed out that Mandrake's hardware configuration tool was known as Lothar, and Lothar was the name of Mandrake the Magician's closest friend.

As a consequence, Mandrakesoft were forced to change the name of Mandrake Linux, which had once been known as Linux Mandrake, to

Mandrakelinux.

Keep off envy's stinging

In April 2005 MandrakeSoft, merged with the Brazilian Linux company Conectiva, and changed its name again. Mandrakelinux became Mandriva, both to signify its merger with Conectiva and to achieve final release from the court case.

In June the same year Mandriva acquired the assets of Lycoris, the Linux distribution formerly known as Redmond Linux, and later purchased EdgeIT, a support and services company with a selection of corporate clients, and Linbox, a French open source enterprise software infrastructure company whose customers include Renault, EADS, Arcelor and multiple French government agencies.

Mandriva has developed relationships with government departments and corporates in the Francophone and Latin American markets, and has thriving OEM partnerships with the likes of Positivo, who at one time were claiming to ship 40,000 Mandriva desktops a month, and with HP.

The company has continued to suffer mishaps and PR failures, such as the dismissal of Gael Duval in 2006, GPL violations over the release of Iris, the Lycoris click and run facility, and an unseemly falling out with its German user group over LinuxTag 2009, but has found some measure of stability after the ups and downs of preceding years.

The dismissal of Duval marked the end of an era, and a change of focus. As he said at the time, "I frankly don't know where the company is going.... It seems that the company is going to address the corporate market more and more.... My opinion is that we should have stuck to the roots (individuals and SOHO)." But although Mandriva may have made a strategic play towards the more robust financial returns that come from fostering services and support to industry and the public sector, this hasn't noticeably affected Mandriva's ease of use or sense of adventure.

By 2008 Mandriva had sales of $6.6 millions sales and 46 employees, down from 70 during its dotcom heyday, and still claims 2 to 3 million downloads for every new release.

Serves to advance an honest mind

Mandrakesoft and Conectiva were always known as innovative companies. Synaptic, the package management front end that can be used with .deb or .rpm based systems and is well known to Debian and Ubuntu users, was developed by Conectiva.

Mandrake/Mandriva put out the first Linux ISOs, the first truly user-friendly graphical installation and configuration programs for Linux, developed its own Debian like package manager for use with .rpm based systems, urpmi/rpmdrake, which is still in use on Mandriva, and pioneered the availablity of Linux on USB Flash keys with Mandriva Flash, a pre-installed Mandriva Linux distribution on an 8GB USB key. Mandriva was also the first major distribution to produce a customised netbook distribution, Mandriva Mini, which comes pre-installed on some netbooks.

Mandriva is developed using a collaborative development model, known as the 'Cooker'. The Cooker is a version of the distribution that is continually updated, tested and influenced by its volunteer community, much like Fedora and openSUSE, which it preceded by several years. Each release of Mandriva is a 'freeze' of the Cooker at a given point in time, which is then followed by a thorough debugging period. As a result of this process Mandriva retains a reputation for being on 'the bleeding edge'.

Since 2006 Mandriva has been on a six-monthly release schedule. The latest release 2010.0, comes in 4 primary editions, Mandriva Free which is free 'as in freedom' and comes without proprietary blobs or add-ons, Mandriva One, which is freely downloadable, Mandriva PowerPack which is the full Mandrake distribution with proprietary add-ons, and Mandriva Flash, which comes on a custom USB stick. The last two are packaged and paid for. In addition, there are a range of server editions and training and support services for the enterprise.

Mandriva comes with a choice of GNOME or KDE desktops and a full range of features, and still boasts a control centre and configuration tools that are the equal of any on the market. In recent years, Ubuntu may have stolen much of Mandriva's thunder, helped by Mandriva's mishaps and PR failures, but Ubuntu users may still be surprised by the ease of use and sense of adventure that can be found in using Mandriva.