Mandrakesoft Rolls Out 10.1 Community Linux

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Mandrakesoft, one of the second-tier commercial Linux distributors that has a dominant position in its home market of France, last week announced Mandrakelinux 10.1 Community, its latest iteration of the Linux platform. Mandrakesoft started formalizing a process last year whereby it would launch a Community edition of its products, with all the latest features, ahead of a production version intended for customers, which is called an Official edition. The delivery of 10.1 Community means that 10.1 Official is just around the corner.

The new Mandrakelinux 10.1 Community release follows the launch of 10.0 Community in April. Most of the enhancements in this new release are useful mainly for desktop machines, including support for WiFi wireless networking protocols in general and Intel's Centrino wireless-capable processors (the Centrinos are the marriage of the Pentium-M chip for laptops and an integrated wireless adapter). The 10.1 Community also supports BlueTooth wireless devices. Mandrakelinux 10.1 Community also sports the latest Linux GUIs, including KDE 3.2.3 and Gnome 2.6, with KDE 3.3 being an optional install. The OpenOffice desktop suite and the GIMP image viewer are installed by default.

Mandrakelinux 10.1 Community also has a new set of compilers, based on the new versions of GCC (which includes C, C++, Java, and Fortran compilers), the Kdevelop integrated development environment, and the GDB debugging tool. Mandrakesoft says that the use of the new C compiler and a finely tuned Linux 2.6 kernel make for a "snappy" desktop implementation or a high-performance server.

Mandrakesoft says that Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official will be available in November in four different editions. The Discovery edition is aimed at desktop users not yet familiar with Linux, while the PowerPack edition is the full Linux desktop experience. The PowerPack+ edition is aimed at high-end workstations and servers. A separate Mandrakelinux 10.1 for 64-bit X86 processors will also be available, presumably spanning desktops, workstations, and servers as well.

Mandrakesoft has dual headquarters, one in Paris and the other in Altadena, California, and earlier this year it emerged from the French equivalent of bankruptcy protection. Having put a few quarters of decent sales under its belt, Mandrakesoft wants to raise $7.3 million by selling an additional 1 million shares to private investors. The company currently trades its shares on the Euronext Marche Libra and U.S. OTC exchanges, and says further that it wants to move its shares to the French Nouveau Marche, which is a more prestigious stock exchange.