The Official Mandriva Blog

Kicking off the 2008 Spring development cycle in earnest, the first alpha is here. This alpha features X.org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, KDE 4.0 RC2 (in /contrib), GNOME 2.21, kernel 2.6.24, OpenOffice.org 2.3, new NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, PulseAudio by default and more. Despite being a first alpha, it is also in a fairly stable and reliable state, though as always, we do not suggest you use it in a production environment. It is available in Free and One editions, with i586 and x86-64 DVDs for the Free edition and an i586, KDE-based CD for the One edition. As far as testing goes, for this pre-release we are particularly interested in testing PulseAudio and hardware detection. Please report any problems with sound functionality, and any mis-detected or un-detected hardware, to Bugzilla. Of course, please also report any other problems you run into. You can also discuss the alpha in the official forums. Download locations are available on the Wiki page: it may take a few hours for the files to be copied to all mirrors, so if you do not find them on the first mirror you try, try another.

Dear Steve,

Hi, this is François, from Mandriva.

I’m sure we are way too small for you to have heard of us. You know, we are one of these Linux company who is working hard to make its place in the market. We publish a Linux Distro, called Mandriva Linux. Mandriva Linux 2008, our last edition, has a pretty good review and we’re proud of it. You should try it, I’m sure you’d like it. We also happen to be one of the Linux companies that did not sign an agreement with your company (nobody’s perfect).

We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. Maybe you heard about it, Steve. They were looking for an affordable hardware+software solution for their schools. The initial batch was 17,000 machines. We had a good deal to respond to their need: the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. We presented the solution to the local government, they liked the machine, they liked our system, they liked what we offered them, especially the fact that it was open, and that we could customize it for their country and so on.

Then, your people get in the game and the deal got more competitive. I would not say it got dirty, but someone could have said that. Your team fought and fought again the deal, but still the customer was happy with the CMPC and Mandriva.

We actually closed the deal, we took the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. To conclude, we did our job. And, the machine are being delivered right now.

Now, we hear a different story from the customer : “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.�

Wow! I’m impressed, Steve! What have you done to these guys to make them change their mind like this? It’s quite clear to me, and it will be to everyone. How do you call what you just did Steve? There is various names for it, I’m sure you know them.

Of course, I will keep fighting this one and the next one, and the next one. You have the money, the power, and maybe we have a different sense of ethics you and I, but I still believe that hard work, good technology and ethics can win too.

cheers

François

PS: a message to our friends in Nigeria: it’s still time to do the right thing and make the right choice, you will get lots of support for it and excellent services!

Et maintenant, pour les francophones (traduction par Caroline) :

Cher Steve,

Je me présente : François de Mandriva.

Je pense que nous sommes beaucoup trop petit pour que vous ayez, un jour, entendu parler de nous. Souvenez-vous, nous sommes une de ces sociétés Linux qui travaillent dur pour se faire une place sur le marché. Nous éditons une distribution Linux, appelée Mandriva Linux. Mandriva Linux 2008, notre dernière édition, a d’assez bonnes critiques et nous en sommes fiers. Vous devriez l’essayer, je suis sûr que vous l’adoreriez. Nous sommes aussi l’une des sociétés Linux qui n’a pas signé d’accord avec votre compagnie (personne n’est parfait).

Nous avons récemment conclu un marché avec le gouvernement Nigérian. Peut-être en avez-vous entendu parler ? Ils recherchaient une solution logicielle et matérielle abordable pour leurs écoles. La commande initiale était de 17,000 machines. Nous avions une bonne offre qui nous permettait de répondre à leur besoin : le Classmate PC d’INTEL, fourni avec une version adaptée de la solution Mandriva Linux. Nous avions présenté la solution au gouvernement local, ils ont aimé la machine, ils ont aimé notre système, ils ont aimé ce que nous leurs offrions, spécialement l’aspect ouvert et le fait que nous pouvions l’adapter aux besoins de leur pays et même plus.

Puis, votre équipe s’est jointe à la partie et le marché devint plus compétitif. Je ne peux faire de commentaires sur ce point mais certains pourront le faire. Votre équipe s’est battue et se battra encore, mais le client était satisfait du Classmate PC et de Mandriva.
Nous avons conclu le marché, nous avons compris la demande, nous avons qualifié le système et nous l’avons intégré à la machine. Pour conclure, nous avons fait notre travail. Et la machine est désormais livrable.

Maintenant, nous entendons différentes histoires de notre client : “nous allons payer pour les logiciels Mandriva comme prévu dans nos accords, mais ce dernier sera remplacé par Windows.”

Je suis impressionné, Steve ! Qu’avez-vous fait à ces personnes pour les faire changer d’avis ? C’est clair pour moi, et ça le sera pour tous. Comment appelez-vous ce que vous venez de faire ? Il y a plusieurs noms pour cela, je suis sûr que vous les connaissez bien.

Bien entendu, je continuerai à me battre cette fois et la prochaine et encore la prochaine. Vous avez l’argent, le pouvoir et peut être avons nous des définitions différentes de l’éthique. Je reste persuadé que le travail, les bonnes technologies et l’ethique peuvent aussi gagner.

Cordialement,

François

PS: message à nos amis du Nigéria : il n’est pas trop tard pour faire le bon choix, vous aurez beaucoup de soutien pour cela et des services excellents !

We’re proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download on the official site, and on the network of public mirror servers.

The result of six months of heavy development and testing, 2008 includes all the latest software and many enhancements over previous Mandriva Linux releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you’ve come to expect from the latest Mandriva Linux release. We have integrated a reworked hardware detection sub-system, with support for a lot of new devices (particularly graphics cards, sound cards and wireless chips). Also, the addition of new features and ongoing improvements to the renowned Mandriva tools continues, including a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, the new network configuration center, and improvements to the Mandriva software management tools.

You can read about the most exciting new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The Release Notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The Errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them.

Mandriva Linux 2008 was developed by the Mandriva development community, based around the Cooker development distribution. This open, community-driven development system has been in place since 1998, making it one of the longest-standing open source development communities around. The involvement of the Mandriva development community helps us to make Mandriva Linux one of the largest, most up-to-date, integrated, internationalized and standardized distributions available, for which we thank our contributors greatly. We’re proud of the standardization efforts included in Mandriva Linux 2008, including support for the Freedesktop.org XDG menu, user directories and icon theme specifications.

Mandriva Linux 2008 is available for download free of charge at the Mandriva website. The One installation CD is the recommended download with everything you need to start using Mandriva Linux 2008: it comes with a full KDE desktop and application suite, NVIDIA and ATI proprietary video card drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Adobe Flash and Sun Java browser plugins, all included.

Enjoy your brand new Mandriva Linux 2008 system!

« The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco ». It seams that we should be able to reuse Mark Twain’s joke with Paris instead of SFO. I do not remember seeing such bad weather in the summer: it’s been cold, rainy and miserable. And we know many other parts of globe are suffering from horrible weather conditions: heat wave in the south, floods in the North, not to mention hurricanes.

At the same time, the Mandriva weather has been a little rough over the past quarters, which might have added to the general mood.

So it will soon be time to cheer you up with some good news. We have been kind of quiet recently, which does not mean we have not been active. We have been working hard on our products and services offering and on our sales. On the product side, we listened to all our friends and contributors and to the community. On the sales side, our sales team was on the offensive.

We are not ready to show all the results yet, but most projects are in the works and some sales were closed. So let me give you a preview of some of the things we are planning to announce in the coming months:

1. a brand new web site,
2. a major restructuring of our consumer product line and of our club offering,
3. a nice small hardware deal in an emerging market country with our friends from Santa Clara and against our friends from Redmond,
4. a sizable software and services deal in another emerging country,
5. a strategic deal with a major player than could have a strong impact on our desktop sales worldwide.

These will not change the situation immediately from stormy weather to bright sunshine, but it will improve it and will be an indication that we are on the right path.

So, stay tuned and we’ll bring you some of those good news fairly soon.

On Friday, May 25, we held our general meeting of shareholders. It was held at Mandriva headquarters, as it is since we have a room large enough to hold the participants. Shareholder meetings usually gather 30 to 40 people. Most of them are small shareholders, most of them support open source in general, Mandriva in particular.

These meetings follow the formal process of shareholder meetings: our auditors are there, our lawyers are there (but they were not this time), someone checks at the entrance that only shareholders participates and registers the number of votes carried by each attendant (either directly or through proxy). This is an expensive operation each time (50 to 60K€), which is why we limit as much as we can their occurrence.

As we do every time, we first went through a general presentation of the company situation. Then we went through the tedious process of approving all the official resolutions.
The general presentation went on for quite a while. There were many questions and discussions.

• Arnaud Laprévote and Sébastien Lefebvre, the two managers of Linbox, were there. They represented their company and answered a bunch of questions on how they would fit in the global Mandriva picture.
• Laurent Cadieu represented Occam, our new key shareholder. He explained why they invested, what they expect, how they will be involved. Laurent also replied to a whole bunch of questions.

There were also many questions on the company situation, the numbers and the strategy. People were trying to understand what’s going on, why the results are what they are. There were many questions “why don’t you do this and that?â€?. Mandriva is a company for which many people have ideas on what to do and not to do.

For instance, a common question is “why don’t you sell computers with Mandriva insideâ€?. It’s a valid question: if FNAC, Carrefour, Walmart and Fry’s were all selling PCs with Mandriva, we would make a bit of money every time and our problems would be solved. The answer is: we’ve tried many times. It involves an hardware manufacturer and a consumer channel. We have had a few of those (in France, Brazil and Argentina for instance), but they are difficult to organize: you have to convince the hardware vendor, but moreover you have to convince the channel. Then about the idea of selling our own machines on our e-commerce store, the complexity of the process does not justify the small revenue number (and selling hardware is a job in itself).

We also gave our numbers for the last semester (October-March), which were lousy as expected. We will have a formal announcement of those shortly.

Besides a few technical issues (such as changing the nominal value of the stock), here are the important decisions made:

• We approved the 2005-2006 financials.
• We approved a first increase in capital of 1.65M€ reserved to Occam.
• We approved the delegation to the board to organize a second increase in capital open to all shareholders. This will be a maximum raise of 1.6M€. We should open the subscription period in a week or two, and keep it open for about four weeks.
• We approved the Linbox acquisition and the increase in capital to perform the acquisition.
• We appointed two new board members, Laurent Cadieu and Marc Goldberg, both of them OCCAM representatives.
• As French law requires, we proposed to the assembly to vote on 50K€ (roughly) increase in capital reserved to employees (usually boards recommend to vote against, we recommended to vote for).

Thus ends a (way too) long process. We can now go back to our business.

We are now working on a number of changes: cutting costs, focusing more and putting in place a new organization.

I will report on those shortly.

I am often asked about the Mandriva business model. So here is a quick summary of the key points:

1. we’re open source
2. we’re a product company
3. we’re publicly traded
4. we address both the consumer market and the corporate market
5. we address the consumer market through multiple channels
6. we have a network of partner/distributors
7. we address the corporate market through direct sales
8. we are international

Being open source means:

• Every software product we develop and distribute is under GPL (including Pulse for instance).
• We receive contributions and we deeply appreciate the help of all of those who help us develop the distro.
• We provide two free (as in free beer) versions of Mandriva Linux together with their free maintenance: Mandriva Free, which does not include any proprietary components, and Mandriva One, which includes some proprietary drivers. These ship at the same time as the commercial versions of the product and are available for download from public mirrors.

We devote an important part of our expenses (about 30%) to the development of products. These include Linux distributions and tools to manage them. We also invest in advanced r&d projects to develop technology, some of which is integrated in our products.

We are listed on the Euronext Marché Libre. This means we publish quarterly results and we have to follow the rules and regulations from the AMF (French equivalent of the SEC).

We address both the consumer market and the corporate market. Today, we do roughly 55% of our revenue in corporate and 45% in consumer. We believe this double focus makes sense because there are both marketing and engineering synergies between those two segments.

• Marketing, because our image in the consumer world helps us when we address a corporate customer.
• Engineering, because the core of the product is common to both consumer and corporate products.

This does not mean that one funds the other: we believe each business should be profitable by itself.

We address the consumer market through three channels (in order of importance)

1. e-commerce channel includes our web store, Mandriva Store, which sells essentially boxes and downloads, and the Mandriva Club which operates by subscriptions
2. OEM agreements are established with hardware vendors such as HP or Positivo who ship and sell PCs with Mandriva pre-loaded in various geographies
3. Retail stores resell our boxes

Our consumer products are Mandriva Free, One, Discovery, Powerpack, Powerpack+ and Flash. As a service, we provide web support through our MandrivaExpert platform.

Our network of franchisees has about 25 members. Some of them have been with us for quite a while (such as our Czech and Polish friends), but we have recently grown this network aggressively. These distributors execute a strategy adapted to their local situation: they customize products, chose specific channels, and provide associated services.

We address the corporate market through direct sales and in partnership with service companies. Our key products are Corporate Server, Corporate Desktop and Pulse, our tele-distribution tool. Our services are consulting, support, maintenance and training, and we have teams dedicated to each one of these tasks. Work for a large organization typically consists in customizing a distro, helping the customer deploy it, providing tools to manage it and maintaining it and supporting it over time.

We operate worldwide: our consumer business spans 150 countries, our corporate business is more focused on France and Brazil, with some activities in other countries such as the US.

We keep questioning that model. It has evolved over time as we’ve questionned it and we’ve listened to suggestions. It will keep evolving. Except for our core value of being an open source product company.

Blino just put Ruby On Rails in Cooker, making RoR ready to ship in Mandriva Linux 2007.

 

To lever my hype skills (and to please our marketing team, for that matter), I decided to take a look at Ruby on Rails, and to package it for Mandriva.

Blino

It’s not yet integrated with Apache, but MySQL connectivity and Webrick are up-and-running.

Ruby On Rails is a fast-growing web-development framework. It’s been the next big thing for the past two years or so, so we wouldn’t dare let our users miss the chance to try it, use it and abuse it. If you’re a web developer or the curious type, jump into the Web 2.0 thingy with Rails: MCV model, DRY principled (Don’t Repeat Yourself), inline AJAX (you produce AJAX in Ruby ) and lots more fun stuff to play and get serious with.

Other frameworks are going to make it into the distro, like Catalyst (which in fact has been there for a while, our Hardware Compatibility List and Fibric being Catalyst-powered) and Django, as well as more Web 2.0 goodness.

For now, grab a Cooker snapshot and feel the power of freedom-powered-web2.0-agile-sexy-coding for the Web with Ruby on Rails and Mandriva Linux

Either you got smarter, or Linux just got easier

Mandriva Linux is the most widely recommended system for Linux beginners. It’s loved by its fans for its unmatched Control Center, the graphical tool for managing your whole system, and other home-made tools. As a pionneering Desktop Linux distribution, it opened the way to many others.

Now, we simply pushed the frenzy a little further.

A single CD, packed with user-friendliness, hardware recognition, stability and powerful applications galore. You can use it without installing it, by simply inserting the CD into your CD or DVD drive and booting your computer.
Your Internet connection is working, you can read your e-mail, listen to music, play a little and, if you really need to, you can use the OpenOffice.org suite to get some work done.

That’s when you say: “I want more of this!”
(more…)