Thou I started this, I tried to stay away from the conversation. I'm not a programmer, just enthusiast with hardware and network resources to spare for some good deed.
Thanks to Mandrake I earn my salary. Thanks to Mandrake I'm free from proprietary software to the extent I want to be. And in being so naive I thought I should give Mandrake something in return. 5 EUR for Mandrake Club? Well, I thought that I can do better than that. So I hanged around CookerML and noticed, that the state of non-Intel ports is pretty poor. So I decided to contribute. My time, CSC resources and more important good will. Others caught the idea, I managed to get some hardware and we're building VPN and support infrastructure (local rsync, ftp and other less important things) around it. Now we hear, that what we do is futile. That MandrakeSoft doesn't care about "non mainstream", "commercially unexploitable", in other words 'ran by a handfull of geeks' software anymore. HELLO!!! LINUX TO BASE!!! I think you're missing the big picture. Lack of real cross-platform abilities of Mandrake MAKES it a less popular distribution. If I need to set up a Linux workstation on different hardware than x86, I'll go for good 'ol rusty Debian (no offence to Debian developers, it's the way it's meant to be) and forget about Mandrake. And when someone makes a chuckely comment on it, all I can do is say "they're working on it". I know that Intel based desktop is THE MONEY, but to build a brand you need more than that. Especially, when someone wants to do the dirty job for you, just for the sake of it. It's not enough to say "we're working on it" and save some bandwidth on distributing the packages. There are people like here in CSC with both bandwith and other resources to support you. There are people that need/want to test what you do on the cooker and provide feedback. HELLO, that's why cooker was born, right? But no, instead of testing our bollocks off with the cooker for [whatever $arch rings your bell] the hardware sits in the server room crunching endless numbers of cooker packages just to keep it up to date with i586 version. This is bad. All we need is simple (minimalistic even) and universal cooker installer, bootable off floppy, in network mode for the platforms we'd like to work on. Is this that much? Keep the ---> GREAT <--- work on the i586 distribution. Focus on it. Let us work out the rest. You are (IMHO) the only company in Linux world that can benefit from such a tremendous community support. Please, don't tell us that we're bunch of freaks just because we want to run something we like and consider usefull on other architectures than supported by you. Look at PLD (http://www.pld.org.pl) from zero to local hero in less than two years. What makes it brilliant? Good package management (as good as Mandrake's imho) and... i386, i586, i686, sparc, alpha and PPC ports available. Cmon, MandrakeSoft, we're on your side! My $0.02... -- Jaroslaw Zachwieja Centre for Scientific Computing University of Warwick
