Two bad news this week
Saturday, December 6th 2008.
Oh my!
Adam Williamson will no longer work for Mandriva. What? The guy always represent Mandriva so well, some people think that he IS Mandriva. But Mandriva the company, due to a budget cut and harsh economic situation, fired the respected awilliamson. Bad move from Mandriva. Again. Yeah, right. Again. First was Gael Duval. The very founder of Mandrake. And now Adam? What are those guys in Paris thinking?
News spread on Distrowatch. Some of the comments suggest that Adam should work for Canonical slash Ubuntu slash Mark Shuttleworth. I don’t like Ubuntu, hence I don’t like Canonical. Do not agree with that. Some of the other suggest that he should help PCLinuxOS slash texstar. It is based on Mdv2007 anyway. I prefer this idea than the previous one. But Adam stated himself that he may will continue to be an active member of the Mandriva Community. I don’t know. Mandriva the distribution he said. Not the company.
Mandriva in my PC slash laptop? Always trying to get things working the way i like. Hasn’t succeed much. Mdv2006 was fine, Mdv2007 was also fine. The thing is, I didn’t get to install it on my SATA based laptop. MCNLive Toronto was also the same. Pendrivelinux (based on MCNLive Toronto which eventually based on Mdv2007) acts strangely that I can never fully understand. TinyMe 2008.0 has the same problem with SATA drives.
IMHO, Mandriva’s best release was the 2008 spring. One downside is the proprietary codecs, that you must purchase via Codeina if you want to listen to some exotic files like m4a and aac. I’m a KDE guy so the 2009 version along with KDE4 is still no match for KDE3 robustness and customizable traits.
So? so long Mandriva, I am now using PCLinuxOS MiniMe. Along with a working internet connection, MiniMe is a breeze to handle and customize. Especially when adding softwares and codecs. Synaptic is quite nice for an end user, on par with the urpmi graphical interface from original Mandriva. Maybe I’ll try Fedora 10 later on. They have quite nice reviews spread on the web.
Next bad news is Honda quits F1. Again due to economics condition. As the news suggests, a bit of optimism spread among the crew, including Jense and Ross Brawn. A team in need of an owner. Gaaa! I’m kinda confused on this one: will Honda continues to supply the engine for the team? Well Bernie (Ecclestone that is) suggests that all team should use one engine supplier somewhere in the near future. So the team could remain, under a new flag, new names, with … an engine supplier which I still haven’t figured out yet.
This economic storm … what the hell with it?
