The History of Linux Mandrake

The ready-to-work and easy-to-use Linux distribution

Gaël Duval was born in France in 1973. He became interested in computing around 1982 with what was most likely a Sinclair ZX80 or ZX81 plugged into his family’s television (judging by a description he gave and the timeline). He credits the machine’s lack of persistent memory with sharpening his skills as he’d need to re-enter code each time he turned on the machine. Later, he used an Amstrad CPC 464 and then CPC 6128. He was playing quite a few video games, but he did still do some hobbyist coding. His interest in operating system development arose from a magazine article that introduced him to NeXT and NeXTStep. He was amazed at the capabilities of the system, and he was saddened that the world chose Windows 3 instead. Around 1994, Duval had a relatively capable machine and he was running Slackware (most likely version 2.0 or 2.1) which he’d downloaded and imaged onto a crazy number of floppy disks over his university’s internet connection.

Duval earned his Master’s degree in CS from the University of Caen in Normandy in 1997. Following college, he found himself with some time on his hands while performing civil service. He was planning a Slackware-based Linux distribution using the Open Look window manager. His hope was to provide something similar to NeXT but based upon Linux. This would have two different editions: NetOS Server, NetOS Home. Around this time he was also translating Linux HOWTOs into French, and for this he was gifted a boxed copy of Red Hat Linux 4.1. Two things stood out to him about Red Hat: its semi-graphical installer, and the RPM package format. As he was a fan of NextStep, he installed AfterStep for his window manager on Red Hat. Shortly after this, he came across an alpha version of the K Desktop Environment, and he began to play around with it. Neither Slackware nor Red Hat were particularly well suited to novices, or even to those who wanted something that was relatively hassle free. For Duval, this was a market opportunity. His NetOS project was stopped, and his new focus was on this KDE distribution he’d been building for himself. He created Linux Mandrake and released it on the 23rd of July in 1998. This was the first user-friendly and user-focused Linux distribution. The name was chosen by his child whom he once quoted as having said “Mandrake is magic!”

The Linux Mandrake logo, circa 1999

The first version was 5.1 “venice” as it was based upon Red Hat Linux 5.1. This inaugural release made use of Linux kernel 2.0.35. The graphical user interface was KDE 1.0 with some slight modifications made to both the Red Hat system and KDE to make things… a bit easier on users. The aims were simple as Duval states:

• to provide a working and easy-to-install linux-distribution to people who don't want to spend too much time in installing and configuring their Linux system: just install it and USE IT

• to provide a very attractive, easy-to-use, Linux System for newbies coming from the very common OS that you know ;-)

• providing a new distribution in a well-known linux environment (RH 5.1)

Mandrake would attempt to automatically configure X, and this would often actually work. That may seem like a trivial thing now, but at the time it was novel. Many very long rants have been written about just how terrible X is to configure, and Mandrake would often magically handle that for the user. Additionally, Mandrake had semi-automatic mounting for removable media. CD-ROMs and floppies could be mounted and explored simply by double clicking their desktop icons.

Duval did not initially have any real infrastructure with which to cheaply host a large amount of data. He had asked around for space, and a few FTP sites were willing to help him. After the release announcement was made and after hosting was attained and his software uploaded, he went on vacation for two weeks. Upon his return, there were over two hundred emails about Linux Mandrake. Some people were contributing code, some were just sending words of praise and encouragement, and there were two separate emails about CD production, one in the USA and one in Australia.

The initial success of Mandrake 5.1 encouraged Duval to continue the work, and to make something more formal with it. He founded MandrakeSoft with Jacques Le Marois and Frédéric Bastok. Le Marois became CEO, Duval remained lead developer, and Bastok was effectively the head of operations. At this early stage, the trio was attempting to make money selling CDs. This was a largely hand-made process. They burned the CD-ROMs themselves, printed the manuals themselves, and Le Marois brought these to warehouses in Surcouf where these were boxed by hand, and then the boxes were loaded in Bastok’s car in batches of 2000. Bastok then delivered the boxes to stores. Distribution was eventually arranged with Macmillan and this process was smoothed out.

The first major change to the distribution after the company having formed was to optimize for Pentium CPUs. This did mean that a 586-class processor was required. The first release of Linux Mandrake from MandrakeSoft was 5.2 “leeloo” on the 1st of December in 1998. Other than optimization, this was largely just a package update release. Version 5.3 “festen” was released on the 11th of February in 1999 and updated KDE to 1.1 and was the last release to utilize the 2.0 series of the Linux kernel. 1999 also saw MandrakeSoft gain its first large corporate customers and vendors, and these relationships allowed the company to expand rather quickly.

Version 6 “venus” was rather big. First, version 6 introduced “Cooker”. This was essentially a publicly available and publicly developed rolling release of Mandrake from which “frozen” versioned releases of Mandrake were made. This signaled a departure from Red Hat, and Mandrake was, from that point forward, an independent Linux distribution utilizing the RPM package format. Version 6 utilized kernel 2.2.9 and shipped on the 27th of May in 1999. It was followed by 6.1 “helios” (kernel version 2.2.13) on the 14th of September.

With versions 6 and 6.1, those who bought the distribution gained some commercial software with their purchase: StarOffice 5.1, WordPerfect 8.0, IBM Lotus Suite, ApplixWare and Applix SHELF, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Arkeia Network Backup, VMWare, both Blackdown JDK and IBM’s Linux Developer Kit for Java development, DB2, Blender (not yet open sourced), MainActor, WebSphere, and Myth II. This was huge. Linux was far more obscure in the 90s than it is today, and yet proprietary software was ported to the system and made available with Mandrake.

As big as Linux Mandrake 6 was, 7 was bigger. Mandrake 7.0 “air” released on the 14th of January in 2000, and this release featured many tools and utilities unique to Mandrake. One was urpmi which would fetch packages from repositories, automatically resolve package dependencies, and otherwise search, install, update, and remove packages. This was 2 years before YUM, but roughly 2 years after APT. Another was drakxtools. Drakxtools is a collection of utilities that simplify Linux administration tasks: backups, networking, firewall, localization, service enable/disable, boot configuration, disk management, date/time, VPN, and more. The Mandrake installer was one of the first fully graphical Linux operating system installers, and it was excellent. System installers prior to this were usually made in curses, which is reminiscent of the Borland interfaces in MS-DOS. The process was divided into the steps with which we are all now familiar (language, disk, user creation, package selection, etc) but it included explanations along the way. For a first time Linux user, this was quite helpful, and for more experienced users it gave context to the automation. Mandrake 7.0 shipped with kernel 2.2.14, and a boxed copy would set the buyer back $30 (around $53 in 2023).

Around this time, Bastok received a letter from the Hearst Corporation’s lawyers that wasn’t very friendly. The Hearst Corporation claimed that MandrakeSoft was infringing upon their trademark for the “Mandrake the Magician” comic strip. This court battle dragged on for quite some time.

Version 7.1 “helium” was released on the 13th of June in 2000 and brought the kernel version up to 2.2.15, and was the last release to ship with KDE 1.1. This release also featured ReiserFS. ReiserFS is a journaled filesystem and it wasn’t yet part of the kernel. Mandrake’s inclusion of the filesystem gave it increased reliability in a time when other distributions only offered ext2. There were issues with using such a new filesystem though, namely instability with NFS, and potential out-of-order writes. Still, Mandrake was leading the pack offering a B+ tree filesystem quite early. Helium also saw Mandrake double-down on internationalization with far better East Asian language support. Near and dear to my heart, Mandrake also shipped ruby for the first time in version 7.1.

On the 7th of August in 2000, Le Marois stepped aside as CEO (but remained Chairman) and Henry Poole took over. Mandrake was considered one of Linux’s big players alongside Red Hat, SuSE, and Caldera, but it was not yet profitable. The founding trio were hoping that Poole’s experience would help them… but instead of controlling expenses to help make them profitable, he increased expenses. He brought in six others with him and all of them were more highly paid than was usual for French megacorporations… and a megacorp MandrakeSoft wasn’t (they were around the 30 person mark). Suddenly, MandrakeSoft had 5 company cars, all wages were increased, and Poole was frequently taking Concorde flights between Paris and NYC. MandrakeSoft was also providing a full time developer for the KDE project, and the comapny entered into an acquisition of Coursemetric on the 27th of December in 2001. Coursemetric was an online education company, and Poole ostensibly wanted to acquire them in an effort to provide online training and consulting. As time went on, it became quite clear that his plan was to exit the Linux market entirely and pivot to online education. This was unacceptable. From September of 1999 to March of 2001, the company lost about $12 million while revenues were around $4 million. Of that $4 million, over 70% was from their partnership with Macmillan. Poole was fired in April of 2001. Le Marois returned as CEO, and Bastok resumed his role as the leader of operations. This was a particularly rough time for MandrakeSoft. The company had to fire almost half of its staff, lower pay, and simultaneously try to get more money. The acquisition of Coursemetric was halted by the board which promptly resulted in a lawsuit against MandrakeSoft.

Despite all of the chaos, work continued. Linux Mandrake 7.2 “odyssey” released on the 30th of October in 2000 and bumped the kernel version to 2.2.17 and the KDE version to 2.0. Version 8.0 “traktopel” was released on the 20th of April in 2001 with Linux kernel 2.4.3 and KDE 2.1.1. Kernel 2.4 brought with it a number of improvements and Mandrake made use of them. Among these were: ISA plug and play, USB, PC Cards, Pentium 4, PPC, Itanium, 64-bit MIPS. This release also included KOffice so if a buyer didn’t spring for a more expensive edition featuring StarOffice, there was still a capable office suite included. Another major change was the addition of support for ext3, JFS, and XFS filesystems. Linux was maturing and Mandrake was offering all of the latest advancements.

Around this time, Mandrake also started the Mandrake Club. This was essentially a subscription to Mandrake that offered commercial software, premium support, free training, forum access, a newsletter, and other services.

MandrakeSoft went public on the 30th of July in 2001 at a share price of $5.41 (roughly $9 in 2023) . They raised about $4.3 million (around $7.4 million in 2023). This certainly helped the company continue to operate, but it didn’t save them.

Version 8.1 “vitamin” was released on the 27th of September in 2001 bumping the kernel version to 2.4.8. The most notable change with 8.1 was in the naming. Linux Mandrake became Mandrake Linux. Version 8.2 “bluebird” was released on the 18th of March in 2002 and pushed the kernel version to 2.4.18, and this was the last release to feature KDE 2. Version 9.0 “dolphin” shipped on the 25th of September in 2002. This released pushed the kernel version 2.4.19 and the KDE version to 3.0.3. This version also included OpenOffice.org as StarOffice had recently been made open source.

On the 25th of November in 2002, Le Marois once again stepped aside as CEO and the company hired François Bancilhon. On the 13th of January in 2003, MandrakeSoft filed for bankruptcy protection in France. They were in the red for $2.1 million (around $3.5 million in 2023) the year prior.

MandrakeSoft didn’t allow things like finances to get in the way of their software. Mandrake Linux 9.1 was released on the 25th of March in 2002, and bumped the kernel version to 2.4.21 and KDE to 3.1. On the 7th of July in 2003, Mandrake Linux 9.1 was offered pre-installed and bundled with CodeWeaver’s Crossover on some HP Compaq machines. This started with the Compaq Business Desktop d220 Microtower, who’s lowest configuration was $349 (about $579 in 2023) and featured an Intel Celeron clocked at 2.0 GHz, a 40GB HDD, and 128 MB DDR RAM.

Version 9.2 “FiveStar” shipped on the 14th of October in 2003. This was the last release to use a 2.4.x kernel with 2.4.22.

Frédéric Bastok left the company in 2004. He was exhausted, and the last few years were troubling. He’d had to fire people he liked, and he never knew if the company would be able to pay anyone by month’s end. February of that year, the Heart Corporation’s legal team finally won their lawsuit, and MandrakeSoft would be required to change its name. Despite having filed bankruptcy, despite losing a founder, despite being forced to work on a name change, the company continued. On the 4th of October they acquired Edge IT as the company was attempting to get more enterprise customers. MandrakeSoft ended the year reporting that they’d managed to bounce back into the black with a profit of $1.85 million (nearly $3 million in 2023).

On the 24th of February in 2005, MandrakeSoft acquired Connectiva. Connectiva was a similar company to MandrakeSoft developing an RPM-based distribution in Brazil. They used APT instead of urpmi, and they’d developed the Synaptic Package Manager which was a GUI frontend for APT. Connectiva had also developed some patches for the kernel that improved performance a bit. Immediately following the acquisition, MandrakeSoft registered several top-level domains for Mandriva. Sure enough, on the 7th of April in 2005, Duval announced the name change. MandrakeSoft was dead, and the new name was Mandriva. This satisfied Hearst Corporation and the long legal battle was finally over. Unfortunately, while Connectiva had reported themselves as being financially solvent, this wasn’t entirely accurate. Le Marois described it as “a financial pit.” Both Duval and Le Marois left the company in 2006.

As usual, chaos didn’t hinder the software. Version 10 was relased on the 4th of March in 2004 and increased the purchase price to $60. This was also the first time that the consumer product was offered with AMD64 support, and the kernel version was pushed to 2.6.3. A point release update came on the 16th of September in 2004. After these releases, Mandriva would change to using the year as the version number with occasional point releases when needed. KOffice was dropped in 2005, only to return in 2007. GOffice was added in 2009.

The company kept on for roughly 5 years after the two remaining founders had left. They offered a good Linux product, support, training, documentation, and consulting. Unfortunately, the company didn’t flourish. Around half of the company’s staff was laid off in 2010.

The last release was on the 29th of August in 2011. Btrfs had been added, the kernel version was 2.6.38 and OpenOffice, KOffice, and GOffice were dropped while LibreOffice was added. On the 30th of January in 2012, Mandriva announced that they were in progress to be acquired. While it was rocky, it did go through. Mandriva was put into receivership early in 2015 and liquidated on the 22nd of May in 2015.

As for why Mandriva ultimately went bust, I believe it is due to two major things. The first is Ubuntu. Ubuntu was released in 2004 and very quickly became the most popular Linux distribution globally. Funded by Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu did not need to become profitable in any short time frame, and Canonical would mail you an Ubuntu install disc free of charge. This undercut Mandriva severely as the bulk of their revenue came from box sales and subscriptions. Ubuntu was user friendly and cost zero dollars. The corporate market for Linux was no refuge as Ubuntu quickly gained the number 2 spot in enterprise pushing Mandriva out of the market as well. The second major cause of Mandriva’s undoing was the loss of perceived value. Much of the proprietary software users could previously get from Mandriva’s more expensive subscription tiers and in their boxes were no longer relevant for the majority of users in a world where HTML5 and JS killed flash, open source hypervisors were available and of high quality, StarOffice was now open source as was the JDK and Blender, and Loki was out of business.

For myself, Linux Mandrake was the second Linux distribution I used. It was excellent, and the manuals were a great learning resource. The trouble the company had was serious and unrelenting, but these weren’t soft people. They persevered and built some amazing software.

Mandriva’s legacy is preserved in Mageia, which was formed in September of 2010 by many of the employees who’d been laid off. From the start, Mageia has been operated as a community effort by a non-profit organization.