Hi, I know that I have been not on this forum for a while but I have been somewhat busy with a few projects.
But before I explain what I has been doing over the last couple of months, I would like to take this opportunity to wish everybody at Nethserver (both the development / administration teams and all their users) a happy new year.
Earlier today, I read an interesting article which explained that Gael Duval (the original developer of Mandrake / Mandriva) is now working on an open-source platform / distribution for mobile devices (URL provided below). Anybody who has been following some of my previous posts will know that I am a huge open source advocate (and have been using open source products since the mid / late 1990s) and will have realised that I have used a large number of different Linux distributions throughout that time.
Between 1998 to 2011 (the period that Mandrake was a viable French company), I was a big fan of the Mandrake / Mandriva project.
For a while after the death of this distribution / company, I did experiment with some of the Mandrake forks (PCLinuxOS and Mageia. Although, I never really spent that much time reviewing / using the OpenMandriva fork).
Back in the early - mid 2000s, Mandrake (a French company) did try to compete with Novel / SuSE and Redhat (the creators of the Redhat Linux Enterprise Desktop and Server) by producing a number of commercial “big-box” server, desktop (workstation) and portable (USB flash key based distribution) products.
What made Mandrake stand out from the rest of the Linux crowed was that the developers produced a well made and intuitive advanced control panel (not that dissimilar to SuSE YAST configuration / control panel).
I am very happy to see that Gael Duval is continuing with Mandrakes tradition of being innovative and is attempting to produce an open-source solution for mobile devices (I wish him the best of luck and hope that he can find a good hardware manufacturer / production house to support this project).
As for myself, over the past couple of months, I have produced and released a number of articles which examines various open source ideas and other technologies. In the next couple of months, I am intending to increase the production of these articles (and as such, I have just purchased a years subscription for a new domain name - which I am hoping to have a new website go live within the next couple of months).
In the meantime, I have released these articles on the minds.com social media platform and encourage others to spend a couple of minutes to view these posts (URL provided below).
As I have already said above, I hope that everybody had a good new year and are looking forward to 2018.
References:
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Mandrake Linux Creator Launches a New Open Source Mobile OS
https://itsfoss.com/eelo-mobile-os -
My blog articles that looks at open source and various technologies
https://www.minds.com/blog/medworthy -
My minds.com channel which examines both technology and politics
https://www.minds.com/medworthy