It's Official, a new Linux system from Mandrake

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 15 Apr 2004 at 12:00

Mandrake has released its first product since emerging from bankruptcy.

Mandrakelinux 10 Official is also the first 'Official' product released through Mandrake's new development processes. Following the initial completion of a product, the company now opens it to testing by thousands of Linux developers as a 'Community' release, to iron out any bugs for two months before the final 'Official' release.

Mandrake co-founder Gaël Duval told us that the new process had proved very effective in making Mandrakelinux 10 Official rock solid. 'The most important thing was to avoid any bad surprise such as the LG bug in 9.2. For instance, the Community version revealed an issue with Windows partitionning for several people. This problem hadn't been reported before. As a result, we fixed it, and the Official doesn't have this bug,' he said.

Duval said that 64bit versions too would soon be forthcoming. 'We have just released the Beta2 for AMD64 (Athlon and Opteron). We will also soon open pre-orders. This is an emerging market, but we sold
several hundred copies of the 9.2 version, and it will increase, for sure. The price is around €100.

'We are also maintaining a IA64 (Itanium2) version of Mandrakelinux internally. We ship it to special big customers such as Total.'

Mandrakelinux 10 boasts the latest 2.6 version of the Linux kernel, along with KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4 and Mandrake's own Mandrakegalaxy II desktops.

It also claims unrivalled hardware recognition, including Serial-ATA, FireWire and USB2. There are also third-party extras such as Nvidia drivers, Flash player, Acrobat Reader and Real player among the applications included.

It will be available in early May, as ISO images downloadable from the company's Mandrakeclub area or in various flavours at retail. Pre-orders are already being taken at Mandrakestore.com.

The Discovery version of Mandrakelinux 10 Official is aimed at beginners and includes two CDs containing the operating system and more than 1,200 applications and a Mandrakemove 9.2 LiveCD which will allow the extremely wary to try Linux without even having to install it. There's also one month's free membership of Mandrakeonline 'Personal Solutions'. It costs €44.90 (£30).

PowerPack is a fully featured desktop with OpenOffice 1.1, Mozilla 1,6, Kontact and image-editor Gimp 2.0. Its six CDs include more than 3900 applications. There are also printed manuals and 60 days' support for €79.90 (£53).

The PowerPack+ replaces the ProSuite and is aimed more at the business environment with a productivity oriented desktop and server apps including the Kolab 1.0 groupware system, DrakPark, DrakFax, Samba 3.0, Apache 2 and more. The pack contains the operating system and more than 7,000 applications on eight CDs and 1 DVD plus printed manuals, 90 days support and a free month as a Silver Level MandrakeClub member. It costs €199 (£133).