[Wolves] Mandrake (Or Mandriva)

[Chris Ellis]

Hi

Sorry this reply is brief (rather busy migrating the work Internet
connection)

I was a Mandriva club member many years back, it was shutdown in 2009,
roughly when adam williamson was dropped.

Basically the club, was paid membership, yearly fee, in bronze, silver,
gold, etc and optional corp status.  I think silver was ~ 50 euro PA.

It gave you access to releases before the public.  Members also got access
to the Powerpack edition for free, ( 2 releases per year).
Powerpack have proprietary drivers, a (legal) DVD player and the offical
Adobe reader.

It also gave access to dedicated update and download mirrors, meaning
better performance.

Mandriva's mirrors were always horribly overloaded.

Members could also offer to be bit torrent seeders, this meant, we got
access to the release a few weeks ahead of other members and the public.

It also provided a closed forum and support, help desk etc.  Where you
could ask techy or no techy questions.

Mandriva club was separate from Powerpack downloads which were brought
though the Mandriva Store.

Mandriva club tended to be more about community / user group.  People were
members because they wanted to show support.

The club basically fell into disuse in the first round of Mandriva finicial
difficulties - they dropped a load of contractors.

Then when Mandriva ditched the French staff, which spurred Mageia to be
formed.  The club was pretty much shutdown overnight.

The domain doesn't event resolve now!

So in summary, I was happy to be a Mandriva club member.  It was a shame it
shut.  But in reality there was little difference between free and
powerpack, mainly: owerpack came with nvidia drivers on the ISO and free
didn't.

Feel free to ask any more questions and I'll try to answer them.

Chris

On 1 February 2012 13:40, Peter Cannon <dick_turpin at archlinux.us> wrote:

> On 01/02/12 13:27, Dan Dart wrote:
>
>> Yeah I looked at that (Dan) but I'm 99% convinced in 2002 it was something
>>> like Mandrake Club or something like that that you had to sign up to to
>>> get
>>> updates?
>>>
>> You had to sign in to download anything that wasn't free or one - and
>> to get updates for powerpack and above iirc
>>
>>
> Hmm? I actually want to get what I write correct for once, I know
> incredible isn't it? This is what fame and fortune does to you. Next thing
> you know I'll be marrying some Australian Sheila and announcing I'm the new
> community manager for Yellow Dog Linux.
>
>
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