Wow, such memories here. Back in my teens, Mandrake was the first distro that actually worked for me and helped me start to understand Linux.
I was working at an ISP back then, variations of Unix everywhere, and had to get into Perl coding for a task. Having Linux on my machine seemed like a great place to start, and Mandrake was the one that installed best on my hardware.
I still go back and forth as to whether it was ultimately worth it for me to get into Linux (time-wise) -- I probably would have been better off focusing on entrepreneurial efforts than not-so-necessary techie stuff -- but at the end of the day, learning Linux has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in managed hosting fees and contractor rates alone.
Knowledge of Linux also been a clear difference-maker in nearly any technical job interview I've ever had, so I suppose it was worth it at the time for sure.
RIP Mandrake, and thanks to anyone who helped make that project possible.
Counterpoint: Mandrake was the first distro I installed as a child -- but it was very broken. I picked an 'RC' (IIRC, RC1) because the version number was bigger and I didn't know what RC stood for.
Oh, well, don't feel bad... the non-RC versions were also plenty broken back in the day. Play word association with me and hand me "buggy Linux distro" and you'll get back "Mandrake".
And I've played with a lot of Linux distros since then....
(This is way back, like, less than a major version after it forked from Red Hat. The first thing they did was put all the latest newest pretty shiny in to the distro. This had the expected effect on stability, unfortunately. And Linux has come a long way, as has everything else despite our occasional complaints... "expected effects on stability" == "hard hangs". Back then, "hard hangs" tended to encompass disk corruption pretty frequently too, even if you didn't go with the latest & greatest filesystem, which was actually "slightly faster but much buggier than ext2", which itself was not necessarily great. My goodness, we really have come far....)
Same here. As I remember Russian website/magazine xakep.ru (rus. 'хакер' - hacker) had an awesome guide on how to install and configure the Mandrake distro.
He was an incredibly smart and cultivated man, and it makes me sad to see Mandriva go down, it was a beautiful and successful project (at least for a while).
I am very thankful for all the hard work people put in these fantastic projects
Indeed you were lucky. Mandriva really was a great distro. I started using it in 2005/2006 and with gnome bridged the gap in terms of usability and ease of use. You can see it in use here:
The thing that killed my enthusiasm, was cost then the usability started getting in the way. Historicy buffs will geek out on the fact I started using Mandriva at the same time as I found Aarons python framework, web.py [0]. Up till three months ago, the lessons I learned using Mandriva and webpy allowed me to hack 200 lines of python and run it as my blog on Google AppEngine for a measly $USD10/year from 2007 to 2015.
I actually bought Mandrake on CD at Staples back circa 2001 and so began my first frustrations with Linux and device driver availability. Finding a dial-up modem that had an all-hardware chipset was easier said than done back then.
Haha. For me, Mandrake was the first distro I broke my computer with, around age 12. I wasn't allowed around the computer for a few months, but I did learn a lot about bootloaders.
Huh this is very close to what happened to me - I had once installed Mandrake alongside Windows on my parents' PC some time in the middle school years, and it failed to install itself fully, but it was quick to put the bootloader (LILO, remember that one?) on the MBR. Naturally the LILO config entry for Windows had the wrong partition number or something I don't remember, and Windows wouldn't start anymore.
Mandrake on the other hand had a jolly half-installed X11 windows system which failed to bootstrap itself, leaving me with a nice command line prompt (a good learning experience to say the least.) I think I screwed around with `vi` before my dad called in his friend who worked in software. (Said software friend tried editing LILO config before realizing Mandrake would start in read-only-mode by default (chrooting was something quite alien he didn't work with Linux anyway)), and so he proceeded to use the default partition editor on an MS-DOS floppy disk. Lo and behold said partition editor only works with disks that are 32 GB or smaller. Ours was 40 GB. Partition table borked.
We eventually got it all back. Good experience. I learned about the existence of virtual machines on the desktop (and doing experiments there) right after. :)
I was working at an ISP back then, variations of Unix everywhere, and had to get into Perl coding for a task. Having Linux on my machine seemed like a great place to start, and Mandrake was the one that installed best on my hardware.
I still go back and forth as to whether it was ultimately worth it for me to get into Linux (time-wise) -- I probably would have been better off focusing on entrepreneurial efforts than not-so-necessary techie stuff -- but at the end of the day, learning Linux has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in managed hosting fees and contractor rates alone.
Knowledge of Linux also been a clear difference-maker in nearly any technical job interview I've ever had, so I suppose it was worth it at the time for sure.
RIP Mandrake, and thanks to anyone who helped make that project possible.