On Wed, 27 May 2015 11:57:58 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:

"After struggling for the past several years, Mandriva has finally gone out of business, and is in the process of being liquidated. The company was responsible for Mandriva Linux, itself a combination of Mandrake Linux and Conectiva Linux. When Mandriva fell upon hard times, many of the distro's developers migrated to Mageia Linux, which is still going strong and just putting the final touches on its next major version (5).'

-- source: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/05/26/2157243

So the company dies, but the community, and the software, lives on. Not the first time this has happened in the open-source world, and probably won’t be the last. Mandrake wasn’t the first Linux I used (that would have been Red Hat), but it was the first I ran on my own machine. My first non-Apple PC was a Shuttle box (which still sits in a corner of my office somewhere), bought in 2004. It came with a copy of Mandrake 9.1 “Discovery Edition”, which I installed. I soon found out that “Discovery Edition” meant it was missing the developer tools (GCC etc). So an early exercise in Linux hacking was figuring out how to get the relevant RPMs to add those missing tools to my installation...