The 10th anniversary of Mandriva

This article is a translation from French to English of this original article by Pierre Dandumont, presented by kind permission of M. Dandumont. The original pictures have been replaced with others. You can see the article in its original context and with its original pictures here.

On Friday May 30th, we were invited to Mandriva’s 10th anniversary celebration at the Eiffel Tower. This French company, which specializes in producing Linux distributions, was born in 1998. Previously named Mandrake (the famous ‘magician’), it changed its name after the takeover of Conectiva in 2006. In these 10 years, the company has introduced several innovations in the world of free software and its distribution is one of the world’s most popular (although currently in the shadow of Ubuntu).

The old and the new
Picture: Pascal Terjan, License: CC BY-SA 2.0

We saw several interesting sights at the event, including two machines side by side: one new system running Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, the second (a Pentium) equipped with the first version of Mandrake. The difference is striking and shows that Linux has made great progress in 10 years (as have its competitors). We also got to test the GDium, a laptop which runs Mandriva (exclusively).

Francois Bancilhon, Mandriva CEO - and Tux - making a speech
Picture: Mario Gonzalez, License: CC BY 2.0

There were several speakers who talked about about Mandriva, its multiple projects (such as GDium) and all the places where the distribution is used. Tristan Nitot, the head of Mozilla Europe, came to make a little speech, and even gave us a definition of a ‘Vistaster’: [n.] A huge failure, a colossal mistake; a turning point or an event which, in retrospect, started a once all-powerful company on the road to perdition. Obviously, this kind of suggestion could only receive a warm welcome in a group composed almost exclusively of followers of Linux.

The founders of Mandriva
Picture: Pascal Terjan, License: CC BY-SA 2.0

Apart from this, this anniversary has shown that even if Linux is unknown to the general public (that is now changing), the operating system is, however, increasingly widely used: the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Agriculture are past examples for Mandriva, and the gendarmerie will work with Ubuntu.

The crowd
Picture: Pascal Terjan, License: CC BY-SA 2.0