02. marzo 2005:

Paris, March 2nd 2005 - Mandrakesoft today announced an agreement with the French Ministry of Education and Research which allows the distribution of its line of products and services to Higher Education institutions, including universities and research laboratories, throughout France. The agreement also makes it easy for students and workers from these institutions to purchase Mandrakesoft products for their private use.

01. marzo 2005:

(Toronto, ON - Paris, France, Mar. 1, 2005): The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the premier Linux certification organization, worldwide (http://www.lpi.org), announced today that it has partnered with Mandrakesoft, creators of the Mandrakelinux distribution, to strengthen and promote the adoption of standard, vendor-neutral, Linux certification and training materials.

24. febrero 2005:

París, Francia; Curitiba, Brasil; 24 de Febrero de 2005 - Mandrakesoft, la compañía europea de Linux número 1, anunció hoy un acuerdo definitivo para adquirir Conectiva, La compañía de Linux numero 1 en Brasil e Iberoamérica. Se espera que esta compra incremente significativamente el tamaño de Mandrakesoft y las capacidades de I+D.

11. febrero 2005:

The Linux Professional Institute announced today the certification of a new provider of Linux Professional Institute Approved Training Materials (LATM) in Switzerland and France.
(Toronto, ON - February 7, 2005 ): The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the premier Linux certification organization, worldwide (http://www.lpi.org), announced today the certification of a new provider of Linux Professional Institute Approved Training Materials (LATM) in Switzerland and France

07. febrero 2005:

Moreno Valley, Ca; Paris, France - February, 7th 2005 - Mandrakesoft today announced that its newly released Mandrakelinux Corporate Server 3.0 server solution has received LSB 2.0 certification, following its longstanding tradition of support for open standards.

02. febrero 2005:

Moreno Valley, CA; París, Francia; 2 de Febrero de 2005. Mandrakesoft y BRGM participarán junto con el INRIA en IGGI, un proyecto de investigación en computación grid. El consorcio desarrollará las tecnologías necesarias para convertir cualquier red de máquinas de escritorio normales en un cluster. El proyecto recibirá financiación gubernamental.

01. febrero 2005:

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18. enero 2005:

Mandrakesoft announced today a new partner program for US companies offering Linux products and services to small and mid-sized business customers. The Mandrakelinux Solution Provider Program is designed to support IT services companies in offering the benefits of open source to a mainstream audience through technical and marketing support.

IT services companies are signing up around the country to participate in the program. "We've had a very positive response so far," says Maria Winslow, Program Manager at Mandrakesoft. "Partners are telling us that their customers are requesting more Linux products and services, and they want help making the transition. That's exactly the goal of this partner program - to help increase sales through Linux offerings."

04. enero 2005:

Mandrakesoft announced today the availability of two new products geared toward business customers; Corporate Server and Corporate Desktop. These two Linux systems have received specific development efforts to make them "enterprise-ready". The two products feature longer development cycles and a 5-year maintenance span.

Although Mandrakesoft's main focus has been to make Linux available to the largest number of users, the company has also acknowledged, very early, that Linux required specific adaptations to be functional in a business environment. Mandrakesoft introduced the first version of Corporate Server in September 2000, followed by a second version in early 2003 - two products which have received quite an enthusiastic response. The new version, introduced today, has been thoroughly overhauled to include some major new features. Mandrakesoft's range of enterprise products extends to include Corporate Desktop; a Linux system for business desktop computing.

Both products have been designed to make deployment as simple, fast and painless as possible. The goal has been to keep them efficient and adaptable. In the now-established Mandrakelinux tradition, both feature extensive hardware auto-detection and numerous configuration wizards to get started as fast as possible. They are also very flexible, in the sense that the user-friendly interface does not lock away the administrator from system internals - they have full latitude for tuning Corporate Server and Desktop in every way, and adapt them to a specific environment.

The new Corporate Server, based on a 2.6 kernel, is fit for almost any server task. It has configuration wizards for setting it up as a file server, print server, Web server, directory server, FTP server, and a dozen others. It is also compatible with IBM's database server, DB2. Auto-installation through PXE is remarkably easy. There are unique tools (DrakPark and Mandrakeonline Pro) for facilitating site-wide software maintenance, based on Mandrakelinux's state-of-the-art urpmi system. Enterprise hardware, such as S-ATA drives, is supported out-of-the box on 32 and 64-bit platforms.

Corporate Desktop was made for the coming wave of Linux adoption: Linux on the desktop. Although it is a natural match to Corporate Server, it can be made to fit in any heterogeneous environment. A lot of effort has gone into ensuring interoperability: Drakauth, for example, lets administrators choose between several authentication and directory systems - LDAP of course, but also Active Directory. Corporate Desktop only carries software that has been thoroughly tested and known to be appropriate for a business setting. It is immediately usable as a workstation for office/productivity tasks, groupware and email, and its extensible design means it can be used for other tasks as well (development for example).

Both Corporate Server and Corporate Desktop benefit from a longer development and test cycle over home editions of Mandrakelinux, and from the feedback given by Mandrakesoft's enterprise customers. These systems can be blindly relied on for production use. The five-year maintenance cycle is meant to fit in with the natural pace of product renewal in IT departments. Support is of course also included, with various options for scope and span. Part of the added value is also in the commercial software included, which ranges from Citrix and NX clients to CodeWeavers' CrossOver Office Server Edition.

"It's quite challenging to design enterprise products, because the needs of businesses are more difficult to assess and to cater for. But we've listened to our customers, we've dedicated the necessary time and resources to the task, and now I must say we're quite proud of what has been achieved. I think going for Mandrakesoft Corporate Server and Corporate Desktop is a pretty coherent business decision, even more than just going for Linux, which everybody is doing or about to do anyway.", said François Bancilhon, Mandrakesoft CEO.

Corporate Server and Corporate Desktop are available now for pre-order. More information is available at: https://mandriva.com/business/corporate-server

About Mandrakesoft

Mandrakesoft is the publisher of the popular MandrakeLinux operating system, one of the most full-featured and easy to use Linux systems available. The company offers its enterprise, government and educational customers a complete range of GNU/Linux and Open Source software and related services. Mandrakesoft products are available in more than 120 countries through dedicated channels and also from Mandrakestore.com, the company's online store. Number 1 in several countries, Mandrakesoft has won many awards for quality and technical innovation. "Born on the Internet" in late 1998, Mandrakesoft has offices in the United States and France. Mandrakesoft is traded on Paris Euronext Marché Libre (ISIN Code: FR0004159382/MLMAN; Reuters code: MAKE.PA) and the US OTC market (stock symbol MDKFF).

Press Enquiries
Gael Duval/Simon Barthelme
+33 1 40 41 00 41
[email protected]
mandriva.com

21. diciembre 2004:

Paris, France; December 21, 2004. Major European research institutions and Open Source software companies today announced the launch of EDOS, a project dealing with complexity management in the field of Open Source software. The participants will collaborate in the development of theoretical and technical solutions to the management of large-scale, modular software projects. EDOS will receive EUR 2.2 million in European Union funding, in a total budget of EUR 3.4 million.

Software projects have grown to unforeseen levels of complexity. For example, most recent Linux operating systems are comprised of thousands of individual packages. This makes putting together such a system a difficult task; and the short release cycles traditionally practiced in Open Source software mean that this task has to be constantly repeated. This is the case, not only for Linux, but for any large, modular software project.

Consortium members are more specifically concerned with the issue as it appears in Open Source projects. As the amount of Open Source software grows, so does the problem of complexity. That does not mean, however, that nothing can be done about it. Today the building and testing processes are only partly automated, leaving much room for improvement in productivity and quality testing. Participants in EDOS, which stands for Environment for the Development and Distribution of Free Software, will research and implement new ways to manage complexity in Open Source software. The team includes 6 research and academic institutions and 4 software and services companies (see full list below).

Two particular applications are planned. The first one deals with the build process: a distributed, peer-to-peer application, designed to aid the integration of the many software parts that make up a Linux system, will be developed. It is expected that the move from a centralized build and storage process to a distributed one will greatly increase efficiency, because storage and computing capabilities will increase exponentially, and so will network throughput. Resources are not the only problem at hand: intricate problems of dependencies between units inevitably arise in large projects, with every part depending on many others for their proper operation. EDOS members intend to find ways to deal with this problem in a systematic way, using the tools of theoretical computer science.

"There's an issue any large project has to deal with at some point, and that's how to manage complex dependencies between parts so as to get an integrated, coherent whole.", said Roberto Di Cosmo of Paris 7. "This is getting crucial for Open Source software projects as well, because more and more time is being wasted on management issues. We will propose a solution to this problem using formal methods from theoretical computer science, a research area which is particularly strong in France".

The second one deals with quality testing. Free software today lacks a test suite that is both automatic and comprehensive. Testing a Linux OS, or indeed any large application built on Free/Open Source software, is a time-consuming and essential operation. Part of EDOS' plan is to develop tools to make testing more efficient and more comprehensive. A unified, computer language-agnostic framework will allow developers to easily create test modules for their software. Overall quality should greatly improve as a result.

"It is next-to-impossible to manually test every single function in a large piece of software", declared Anton Anisimov of SOT. "Having a program do it is only natural. A comprehensive, effective test framework will save developers, testers and users a lot of time and will save organizations a lot of money. We believe this will be a major contribution to future software development".

EDOS will receive European Commission funding in the amount of EUR 2.2 million. The project runs for a period of 30 months. The resulting software will be released under an Open Source license, and theoretical results will be published in scientific journals as advances are made.

"The concrete results EDOS will bring about will benefit everyone, not just Open Source developers. EDOS brings together some of the field's most prominent players, to solve the problem of complex dependencies before it becomes unmanageable and to improve testing processes. This will result, in the short term, in better software. Ultimately, it will also contribute to Europe's competitive edge in the world market", concluded Francois Bancilhon, Mandrakesoft CEO.

Participants

Research and Academic Institutions
- INRIA, France (Project Coordinator)
- University of Paris 7, France
- Tel-Aviv University, Israel
- University of Geneva, Switzerland