Mandrake (from ~2000) was my first Linux distro
They were the Ubuntu of their time. They ripped off another distro (RedHat, in their case) and made it easier to install (or just more free-as-in-beer, I don't remember)
I remember that they imploded soon afterwards. Wikipedia doesn't mention it, but I think it was some security f-up that turned everyone off. Does anyone else remember that? |
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Posted much the same thing at forums.debian.net last month : https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic....744928#p744928 |
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I suspect the infamous Debian OpenSSL blunder of 2008 is what is being referred to? I'm not not sure, but I assumed rkelson's point related to that - and that incident not putting people off Debian.
As with the 2011 breach of kernel.org: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2011/09/...rg-worry-world |
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If there was a viable alternative to Debian, I think their security f-up would have consequences too. |
Mandrake may not exist any longer but there are a number of OS's which are based on it described at the link below. I used PCLinuxOS for 10 years with rarely a problem.
https://www.makeuseof.com/best-alter...andriva-linux/ |
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I never used it for anything serious... Just tinkered with it for a while. I remember being impressed with Mandrake's default configs for supermount. But I didn't think much of the installer. They had quite clearly tried as hard as they could to "dumb it down," and that annoyed me. |
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I installed them fairly early (1995?). Yeah, they were a bit of a disaster support wise, but so was everybody. Linux was still in development, and gnu was suddenly required to come of age and handle a whole lot of horrible hardware.
I became a Mandrake Crashtester. I learned loads. I had a motherboard with the infamous MVP3 "Hardware Fault." They in fact contorted the BIOS settings to suit the (rather awful) Creative sound cards then. But I got support that way. I got the impression Mandrake were going broke around 2000 and wasn't surprised they died. Never heard of any security issue - they were repackaging Red Hat. |
It was the first Linux distro I ever installed, sometime in 1999. I could never get any form of Linux to run flawlessly then, or for years after that, but I would still tinker with it on occasion. It wasn't until about 2008 that I ever got any useful work out of any Linux, but I wanted to learn it because I was never happy with Windows. The first distro I ever ran regularly was Mandrake's first descendant, PCLinuxOS. I came back to it again in 2018, so I guess in a sense, my first distro still lives on here. Still has some of the same features, like the Control Center, too.
I was glad to see when The Register featured the four surviving Mandrake/Mandriva family distros in an article last month. |
By 1999, I was still on a shoestring but had two pcs. One was a dos/w98/linux laptop which was purely business and me. The other had this awful SiS 6326 video card in it. The other was for protection - to keep games and my kids away from my box.
At the time, every video card had 16 video modes pre-programmed from the get-go, but not this. So I needed to install linux in text mode, which narrowed the field! |
Back in those days I was Stormixing. The first real package manager. Some guy named Ian turned me on to that kit.
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