Reiver_Fluffi

That's why I asked, just to make sure that Kiran was indeed acting on "freedom of choice" and that he/she understood that it is dangerous and unnecessary.

Dangerous and unnecessary for who? There are a number of contextual factors unique to each scenario that determine the implications (and their associated risks) of logging in as root through a gui. We know nothing of these factors in this situation, yet people feel the need to pre-judge and decide that is is dangerous, full stop :huh: . If anything, people can do as much damage with the command line ("rm -rf ./*" without the period), therefore the "danger" is based on user experience, not the interface!

Arrrgh, the bloody thing refuses to download anything. It keeps telling me to update flash, but it is up to date!!!

Yeah good news (although we have been able to get it through a browser for a while now ;))

Discussing details of an in-progress, unattained deal is a bad idea. Not only does it get up the hopes of your end users (thereby creating a backlash if the deal is not attained), but it can anger the company you're dealing with, automatically disqualifying you from consideration, as that company may not want the details shared - especially if others are being considered for the contract.There's a difference between showing that you are "working hard to impress global manufacturers" and running around telling everyone what deals you are trying to attain.

Seriously don't know where you are going with this. I was discussing transparency (in terms of business), not a detailed analysis of operations and a breach of commercial confidentiality. Although I'm sure many directors (in general) will try to agree with you on the point of secrecy, as it means concealing their poor performance from the true owners of the company, the shareholders (increasing information asymmetry and furthering the agency problem) .

They can't go running around touting that they are "working on a deal with so-and-so" when the deal hasn't been signed, sealed and delivered - it's a bad business practice.

I disagree, transparency is a fundamental aspect of corporate governance, not bad practice as you put it. If Mandriva were showing that they were working hard to impress global manufacturers and trying to get their foot in the door it would boost investor confidence in the company.

How, for instance, do you guys know we weren't involved in the competition for every one of those 'big manufacturer' deals? Maybe we were.

 

(I don't know. No-one tells me.)

That's the point Adam, it's a global market and Mandriva was not visible on the global scene in terms of OEM deals. Again this is where the company's lack of transparency lets it down, how are we to know if you are involved, it's a pretty safe bet that if we cant see it, then it didn't happen. Netbooks are pretty much in the mainstream, the key to mainstream exposure is OEM (Microsoft is a key example of how this is done), not through retail sales after the original hardware is purchased. These post-hoc installs are only of vaue to a minority of the mainstream who like to tinker, personally I believe trying to make a profitable strategy out targeting such a limited customer base will end up more hassle than it's really worth.

"Mandriva was far too slow to react to the netbook boom loosing out to Xandros, Linpus and Ubuntu"

 

We had two netbook OEM deals announced before Ubuntu ever came up with Netbook Remix. One is already available in France - http://www.clubic.com/article-244144-7-pet...f-netbooks.html .

Yes, but are the volumes involved anything by comparison to Xandros-Asus, Ubuntu-Dell, Linpus-Acer, or Suse-HP? They have global market exposure with large multi-national hardware manufacturers, not national with a little known manufacturer (at least I never heard of them, I doubt others outside France have either).

Yes, OEM deals for Netbooks (and Mandriva is not late yet, no one says Asus, Acer, HP, etc won't switch distro if they believe it's worthwile), and those small desktop PCs like the Asus eee desktop. Netbooks have just started to become popular, they still have quite a future in front of them (especially also in developing countries).

When the first netbooks came out the majority were Linux only, now Linux netbooks are increasingly becoming a niche as the Windows marketing machine has grasped and taken hold of the netbook market with it's dirty fingers. The best time to get a foot in the door in this market was at the emergence of the market, with Microsoft out of the picture and the big players looking for distro's, but Mandriva (IMO) was nowhere to be seen (other than a partnership with some manufacturer nobody ever heard of).

The big players have chosen their partners and established their working relationships, clearly Mandriva the company or the distro failed to impress these manufacturers before now. If these relationships are to cease in the near future it will be because of performance on the part either the distro/manufacturer or increasing pressure from the market to supply Windows netbooks. Waiting for the former is not an appropriate strategy for any business and TBH not much can be done about the latter in today's current climate. You might argue that the distro on it's own may be superior to those already use netbooks and be able fire off a list of selling points in terms of Mandriva's own tools such as the installer and the MCC, but how much of this is actually necessary or desireable for a netbook, and how much of it is unique to Mandriva today?

IBM in the early 80s didn't believe there was any money to be made with personal computers either...

True, but back in those days market information was not so readily available as it is today (ironically the PC is one of the technologies that had improved this over the years), therefore decision makers today are in a far better position to analyse markets and have the potential to make better decisions as a result. Although to be honest, I believe it took a while after that for the PC boom to emerge.

Agreed Mandriva should build upon it's current strength (solid reliable user friendly desktop distro) instead of trying to replicate the Redhat/Novell business model. I don't believe there is no money in a desktop distro, I believe OEM deals, if pursued agressively and on the other hand a retail packages (both physical boxes and download) like the Powerpack can sell well, providing Mandriva greatly increases it's PR and marketing.

The only OEM deals I can see are with netbooks, their low spec is exploited well by GNU/Linux, but Mandriva was far too slow to react to the netbook boom loosing out to Xandros, Linpus and Ubuntu, IMO the scope for new partnerships in this area very limited. As for your bog standard laptop/desktop, I can't see this area take off unless there's a major shift in legislation in favour of Microsofts competitors.

Both Shuttleworth and Red Hat have stated there is no money in the desktop market. Shuttleworth says this despite creating and bringing a popular desktop distribution to the top within a year or so, if he was sitting on a potential gold mine, rest assured he would be the first to exploit it. Red Hat obviously knows where the real money is in terms of commercial linux products as they have focused on the key market area, servers, and made a fortune out of it. These people/organisations have proven that they know how to make money out of Linux, they have better knowledge of the prospective markets than you or I, therefore I am inclined to give significant weight towards their arguements.

The only way is going the Redhat/Fedora and/or SuSE Enterprise/OpenSuSE way: a stable enterprise branch, as well as an unstable, testing Opensource one.

Problem is that in order to do such a thing you need a revenue stream typical of RedHat/Novell or some serious investment from another source. Mandriva's current revenue stream, is not sufficient IMO and I can't see them raising the money from other sources. Going up against the might of RedHat and Novell, replicating their business model is not a desireable investment opportunity (even for VCT's).

Forget the desktop, the market is not enough to sustain a profitable product line for a company of Mandriva's size (this includes netbooks and OEM). I would be looking towards niche markets, possibly abandoning the management of the distro, and choosing to support the deployment of other commercial/non-commercial distros in a business environment until liquidity is restored to an adequate level. IMO this would be a more profitable use of the expertise Mandriva currently holds than maintaining a full distro that many do not pay for. They do not have the revenue base of the likes of Red Hat and SuSe to to invest heavily in the development of a distro that is given away for free, which IMO is reflected in Mandriva's bottom line.

Well said, wobo.

But unfortunately, there's absolutely no point talking to the taxman about poetry.

Steady now, I know that Mandriva have stooped to a new low, but not that low.

What a disappointment!

Sorry to hear that you have lost your appointment, good luck in the future!

(yes no critique on management style from me, you guys have done enough for me )

But it didn't work. I think that you meant to type NAUTILUS instead of KONQUEROR because I use GNOME. Right.

You would be right, nautilus is the file manager in Gnome.

If you have started it up as root, you should be able to copy the files, provided that there isn't a weird permission preventing root from doing so.

I am not sure what the equivalent of kwrite is in Gnome, but try opening up your editor as root (su) and doing your copy and paste using that program.

I believe the issue is how to copy and paste files, not text (but since it was brought up, the equivalent is gedit).

i dont know it was just that fedora was not practical to me,

That may be the case, but really was there any need for your ill-informed rant, over something that was simply "not practical"?

Fedora next, and this was one hell with the over zealotic opensource wackos (Sorry, not including the property drivers in the repos or no manager to get them whatso ever is not freedom, they are making you use crappy drivers and want it to be painful if you want to use branded drivers) and the codecs for media was hell, i got a window saying i can buy codecs for my music for 28 euros!!!!!!!!!!!WTF?

You do realise that Fedora is sponsored and managed by Red Hat? A company operating in the US and bound by US law and protecting itself from litigation against patent infringement (I believe that once upon a time, Microsoft got stung for a patent infringement on an audio codec?). The situation is a little bit more complicated than opensource zealotry, yes they tout being open as a good thing, but they do not stop you from installing proprietary software on their distribution.

IIRC YaST uses qt, not GTK

Note the tongue....wasn't meant to be anything serious. Sigh!

...also featuring 3G support in networkmanager and DKMS for external modules. Welcome to 2004, guys!

 

OK, OK, that's my only cheap shot, I promise. :)

You're just envious of a superior marketing machine :P

Now, there's no need to gloat!

AAAAAAAAHHHH! Too late!

:cheeky: :cheeky: :cheeky:

Never saw the attraction of such events, a bunch of grown men (maybe a few women) installing an OS and making a party of it. Does not sound like a highlight on the old social calendar to me, but then maybe I'm not geeky enough to appreciate the supposed merits of such an event. :unsure:

The registration site has pretty much been down since 09:00 GMT, but I was lucky enough to get my serial before that site went down and Codeweavers have increased the period for activating serials by 48 hours.

I suspect that you are using the rpm from sun to replace a Mandriva rpm, given by the fact that the test is reporting an earlier version . I believe that the sun rpm will not update the Mandriva rpm, Similarly when installing with the sun rpm you have to manually add the link between the plugins directory for Firefox and the plugin you have installed along with the runtime.

what is the output of

ls -la /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins

chances are, it's an underestimate.

I think that budget managers in general would agree with that statement, it would explain why going over budget is so common. :P

In free markets people will only pay the amount that they think the product is worth to them if the nominal cost to produce a product is higher than what the market want to pay the value of the product is not that of the nominal costs but that of the market, no one of their free will will pay more.

Still this fixation on price when the exercise was to measure cost, no point carrying on this line of discussion.

This is beside the point charity/volunteer work has a value only when someone is willing to pay for it with goods/money or services

Utility theory would disagree with that.