MandrakeLinux 10.0 Delivers Linux 2.6 Kernel

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor MandrakeSoft has given its development community and contributors the first look at its upcoming MandrakeLinux 10.0 release, which is the first distribution by the French company to make use of the new Linux 2.6 kernel. The updated Linux release is also the first distribution that makes use of a new development process instituted in February by Mandrake. This new process will allow the company to create a leading-edge version with all the latest features and possibly some bugs and a more stable version that lags by a few months.

For the past five years, Mandrake used a very dynamic distribution system that was constantly being updated by its specific contributors as well as by the larger Linux community. This dynamic system was called Cooker, and it made the latest-greatest Mandrake implementation of Linux available through FTP mirrors and other methods, and using the code changes wrought by over 1,000 contributors. A lot of cool features got added to Mandrake Linux this way, and ahead of rival distributions, too. When Mandrake got close to putting out a release, it would freeze the Cooker collective and out it through beta and release candidate cycles and then launch a finished product. However, not every feature of the complete Linux distribution was thoroughly tested prior to the launch, and with MandrakeLinux 9.2, an incompatibility with certain CD drives was not caught before the official product release. This is NAGT--Not A Good Thing.

That is why Mandrake is splitting its code bases into two pieces. From here on out, the Mandrake Community release will be equivalent to the Cooker process used in the past, and it will have all the latest greatest features, just like Cooker delivered. However, there will now be a release called Mandrake Official that comes two or three months out after the bugs have been shaken completely out of Mandrake Community. This is similar to the split that Red Hat has for its Fedora project, which is on the bleeding edge, compared to Enterprise Linux Server 3.0, which is a stable release that is guaranteed to be more stable.

In early March, Mandrake put out the MandrakeLinux 10.0 Community release, and it expected to have MandrakeLinux 10.0 Official out the door in May. The community release is available for download on ISO images and as a complete set on a DVD. You can download the community release at www.mandrakelinux.com/en/club/, and you can order the DVD at www.mandrakestore.com. The DVD costs $59.90.

The core features that are added to MandrankeLinux 10.0 (both community and official versions) are the Linux 2.6.3 kernel and the GCC 3.3.2 compilers and the Glibc 2.3.3 libraries, which have native POSIX threads library (NPTL) support. The latter is a key feature of Linux 2.6, and significantly boosts the performance of multithreaded applications (like databases). The release also includes XFree86 4.3, Apache 2.0.48, Samba 3.0.2, MySQL 4.0.17, ProFTPD 1.2.9, Postfix 2.0.18, OpenSSH 3.6.1p2, KDE 3.2, GNOME 2.4.0, and Mozilla 1.6. The new software also includes support for Microsoft's Windows Logical Disk Manager and read/write support for the NTFS file system, which improves the interoperability between Windows and Linux considerably. The new Linux 2.6 can support 4 billion unique users and groups (up from 65,000 with Linux 2.4), and as many as 1 billion concurrent processes on a single system, according to MandrakeSoft. The company hints that when it gets the official release out the door, it will then create a version earmarked specifically for corporate desktops and servers.

An aside: Mandrake has dual headquarters, one in Paris and the other in Altadena, California, and it realized that it needs to be a force in the North American as well as European market to compete in the Linux racket. At the end of January 2003, the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and last week was happy to report that it has emerged from bankruptcy. Technically, the company applied for redressement judiciaire in France's Commerce Court, which is akin to chapter 11 protection. Mandrake's reorganization plans allows it to pay down creditors over the next nine years. The company's stock is trading on the Euronext Marche Libra and US OTC exchanges again at around euro 4.39 as we go to press, and the company recorded a profit of euro 270,000 on sales of euro 1.4 million in the quarter ended in December 2003.