Mandrolla

Many of you will know that that the future of Mandriva looks bleak. Most of the active developers of Mandriva were layed off following the liquidation of Edge-IT, a Mandriva SA subsidiary, earlier this year. A few days later, these developers announced a fork of Mandriva, purely community driven and called Mageia. The community was delighted and declared Mandriva dead almost unanimously. Mandriva SA, in turn, protested and assured that Mandriva is alive and intends to stay so.

I actually thought that all this bickering wouldn't matter to me any more, as I've planned to acquire a new computer and to install an entirely different distribution during the Christmas holidays. This won't happen for various reasons, and for a lack of both time and energy, I've decided to just let Mandriva continue to run on my trusted E6600. And why not? Everything works fine, and I have far fewer complaints than with certain other distributions. 😉

So, I was comfortably settled, when suddenly updates started to pour in. Imagine my surprise when one of these updates turned out to be a brand new kernel. Is Mandriva going to be a rolling distro after all?

No, it won't. Actually, this rather unexpected upgrade is officially a Christmas present. Others will suspect an act of desperation, but I'd say that was simply necessary to keep the distro on a competetive level. Who knows, perhaps there's life in the old dog yet. 😉