I had lunch last week with 2 very interesting folks.
To the right, Jacques Le Marois, co-founder of MandrakeSoft (now Mandriva), one of the top 3 linux distributions in the world, along with Novell's Suse (transaction facilitated by Arma Partners) and Redhat. Jacques recently merged (bought) Conectiva, a brazilian linux distro, making him the largest non-US distribution out there. Of course it appeals beautifully to all third-world countries (he mentions India as a great market), and all US-suspicious buyers. MandrakeSoft came out of receivership (bankruptcy) late last year, and is doing great now again.
They're a public company on the Marché Libre, so if you feel like supporting them, buy up some stock or get a DVD on their online shop. I guess their other 2 challengers are Ubuntu linux from South Africa (really great, simple and modular), and Red Flag linux (hey, they're still in China, but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the other 4 strikes a deal with them).
I installed Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 over the week-end (also known as MandrakeSoft 10.2): I downloaded the DVD ISO with bit torrent (they started the technology before everyone else!), and burned it onto a blank DVD. Installation was rather easy, although I prefer the graphical interface of Fedora Core, and I found Ubuntu's to be more user friendly. In particular, as I use a French Keyboard with an English install, I'd prefer to select my keyboard at the beginning, not at the end.
Updating all packages is simple, there are graphical tools for it. I'm used to synaptic by now, and apt-get. Here I got to learn another one: urpmi. Adding repositories for non official stuff and contribs was a bit more complicated; I had to google them, and cut & paste several lines of code.
Jacques: simplify this.
Finally, I had to recompile some code to get my Orinoco wifi card to work properly with some of the tools I use. Enough said. Mandrake should probably simplify this, or even offer an RPM for techies, instead of making me do it by hand. In a nutshell, it's a family friendly distro: I feel it's slightly slower than my previous Fedora, but hey, it's a secondary laptop. I'm not complaining. OSnews had a complete review recently.
To the left, Christophe Becker, MD of geneanet.org, a genealogy portal co-founded by Jacques. I've talked about geneanet in the past: it is a *free* service that allows you to share your family tree on line. It is powered by the really great geneweb software, designed by Daniel de Rauglaudre (version 5.00 featuring Unicode is coming out soon!).
That's where I 've stored my family tree for the past few years. With their club membership, you get for example rid of advertisments, have access to additional serach options (cross search all family trees with any of your data). Christophe wanted to talk about blogs, and ther he goes: he just launched a genealogy blog over the weekend: http://www.lebloggenealogie.com. I guess http://sepulveda.org is having some competition :)
The lunch was very funny, as we kept on finding common acquaintances. Jacques is a cousin of my wife by some not-so-remote link. He's worked with people I know. So has Christophe. Small world.
In addition, it was REALLY the first time I could talk openly about my genealogical research and about open source for over an hour without raising an eyebrow whatsoever. I would even say spooky...
Check them out:
http://www.mandriva.com
http://www.geneanet.org
Update on 8/6/05: great review of Mandriva here, as one of the best user friendly linux distro (via OSnews.com)
