Title: Mandriva Linux

Author: Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier

Date: June 14, 2007 11:47:51 PM or Thu, 14 June 2007 23:47:51

Summary: 

Mandriva Linux is a consumer-oriented distribution available in both freely downloadable form and as a boxed retail product. Its parent company Mandriva represents the combined might of three once separate Linux distributors: Mandrake, Conectiva, and Lycoris.

Body: 

History

Mandrake Linux originated in 1998 as a derivative of Red Hat Linux that used the KDE desktop environment instead of GNOME. Mandrake Linux grew steadily over the next few years, concentrating on ease-of-use and offering a broad selection of applications.

Conectiva emerged at about the same time, also originally a derivative of Red Hat Linux, but on the opposite side of the world. MandrakeSoft was based in France, and Conectiva in Brazil.

Conectiva's Linux distribution served the Latin American market, offering localizations in Spanish and Portuguese. The company also provided consulting, support, and training services.

Lycoris was a Washington-based Linux distributor. Its flagship product Lycoris Desktop/LX was a desktop-oriented distro aimed at being friendly to new Linux users.

MandrakeSoft acquired both Conectiva and Lycoris in 2005, and shortly thereafter changed changed the name of the combined company to Mandriva, and the name of its distribution to Mandriva Linux.

Mandriva has always had a very open development process, centered around Cooker, its freely accessible development version. Interested users can install Cooker and participate in the beta testing of the next stable Mandriva release. Historically, new Mandriva releases come approximately twice per year.

Installer and packaging system

Mandriva comes in both live CD and traditional installer CD formats. Both offer a graphical installation system that handles everything from disk partitioning to account creation.

Mandriva uses RPM as its packaging format, and urpmi as a front end to the packaging system. Urmpi is similar to APT on Debian-based systems: it handles dependency checking, installation, updating, and removing software. A graphical software installer and updater acting as a front-end to urpmi is built into the Mandriva Control Center administration tool.

Mandriva Control Center works by incorporating a number of individual configuration tools as plugins. Each handles a different task, from network setup to printer configuration to individual user preferences.

One such plug-in is MandrivaOnline, through which the system can automatically query and receive update notifications when new versions of installed packages are available.

Even though Mandrake started out as a "Red Hat plus KDE" distribution, Mandriva supports both KDE and GNOME, as well as numerous lightweight environments such as Xfce and Window Maker.

Derivative distros

There aren't as many derivatives of Mandriva Linux as there are of other distros, perhaps because Mandriva itself is officially available in an array of different flavors at different price points.

The live CD edition Mandriva One and the dedicated installer edition Mandriva Linux Free are both free downloads.

Mandriva Linux Powerpack adds considerably more software to the basic distribution, as well as Web support and online training.

Mandriva Corporate Desktop and Mandriva Corporate Server are "enterprise" variants of Mandriva's retail desktop distro that come with guaranteed support contracts. Mandriva Linux Clustering is a specialty edition designed for use in high-performance clustering and parallel computing environments.

On the other hand, if simplicity is your thing, you can try Mandriva Flash, a 4GB USB flash drive with Mandriva pre-installed. Mandriva Flash can be booted and directly from flash, with no installation required.

All of the official Mandriva products (both free and retail) are available for i386 and AMD64 architectures.

Despite the large ecosystem of official Mandriva releases, there are still a few third-party derivatives worth mentioning.

VnlinuxCD is a live CD based on Mandriva localized in Vietnamese. MCNLive is a Mandriva-based live distro that can be customized and built as a live CD or bootable USB flash drive system.

How to get it

You can download all of Mandriva's free editions from the download page at Mandriva's site. Mandriva Linux One is a CD-sized ISO image, and Mandriva Linux Free is a DVD image.

At Mandriva's online store, you can purchase any of the company's retail or enterprise editions, as well as support contracts.

Visitors to conectiva.com are redirected to a Brazilian Portuguese version of the Mandriva site, where they will find localized versions of Mandriva products.

Notes: 41

More fields may be available via dynamicdata ..