The main thing is, I can’t make out just what Mandriva has and has not bought. I can’t figure out whether there’s anything left of Lycoris, the company. Their CEO is moving to Mandriva to head up the new product. Their software collection and user forums are moving to Mandrake Club. Their flagship product is being merged with one of Mandriva’s. But the wording of the press release implies that they haven’t bought everything. If I were to guess, Lycoris might start focusing on their Tablet PC line.

What does seem to be happening is that Mandrake has begun collecting a number of the smaller commercial players in the Linux arena. Who knows? They may be in a position to challenge Red Hat and Novell soon.

Now they’re changing their name to Mandriva. I know the portmanteau is a logical choice from a purely linguistic perspective, but at least to my English-speaking ears it sounds like something out of a low-budget horror movie. Beware the Mandriva or Mandriva, the Terror from Beyond Source. Or maybe a fictional Central American country, the Republic of Mandriva.

Eh, I’ll probably get used to it. I wasn’t too enamored of Linspire, either. (Come to think of it, I still think that one’s a bit clunky.)

At least this should put to rest their long-running trademark dispute with the owner of Mandrake the Magician. Even if they started out with a penguin in a wizard hat, I still don’t think people are going to get a Linux distribution mixed up with a crimefighting comic book magician.

It looks like SuSE’s the only big-gun Linux company who hasn’t changed their name (if you count the Red Hat/Fedora spinoff), and now that they’re part of Novell, I suspect it’s only a matter of time. It’s probably the lack of corporation that’s kept the Slackware and Debian names intact.

Mandrake’s a nice OS. I keep trying to switch, but I keep coming back to Red Hat Fedora. While my own experience with Conectiva has been, shall we say, less than stellar, they did port Debian’s outstanding package manager APT to work with RPM, and started the development of Synaptic, which should (in my opinion) be the standard way to install and upgrade software on any package-based Linux distribution with a GUI.

For now it looks like they’ll be maintaining separate brands based on a common core (hmm, sounds familiar), but I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up merging the products in a few years.

Hey, if it means Mandrake replaces their clunky update system with APT and Synaptic, I’m all for it.

(See also CNET’s take.)

What I liked about the SuSE installer was the way the option was worded. The setup utility asks you if you want to “test your Internet connection.” It tests the connection by downloading the latest release notes and checking for updates! (Unfortunately, it somehow chose an old mirror of the SuSE site—not the one I used during the installation—and the process failed.)

It should be more flexible (and run faster) than CD-based distributions like Knoppix or Mandrake Move [archive.org], although it’s bulkier than carrying a CD and a keychain.

Hmm, I wonder if I could get Damn Small Linux to boot off a USB keychain…