I've been thinking for a lot of time analyzing my already years ongoing passion for Free Software, trying to answer the question "What really made me be a keen user and follower of the ideology of the free software movement"? I came to the conclusion it is the sharing part of free software that really made me a free software enthusiast. Let me explain ….
In our modern world sharing of personal goods (physical goods, love for fellows, money, resources etc.) has become critically low.The reason is probably the severely individualistic Western World modern culture model which seems to give good economic results. Though western society might be successful in economic sense in man plan it is a big failure. The high standard in social culture, the heavy social programming, high level of individualism and the collapsing spirituality in majority of people is probably the major key factors which influenced the modern society to turn into such a non-sharing culture that is almost ruling the whole world nations today.
If we go back a bit in time, one can easily see the idea and general philosophy of sharing is very ancient in nature. It was sharing that for years helped whole societies and culture grow and mature. Sharing is a fundamental part of Christian faith and many other religions as well and has been a people gathering point for centuries. However as modern man is more and more turning to the false fables of the materialistic origin of man (Darwininsm), sharing is started seeing as unnecessary . Perhaps the decreased desire in people to share is also the reason why in large number people started being self-interest oriented as most of us are nowadays.
As we share less and less of our physical and spiritual goods, our souls start being more and more empty day after day. Many people, especially in the western best developed societies; the masses attitude towards sharing is most evidently hostile. Another factor which probably decreased our natural human desire to share is technocracy and changing of communication from physical as it used to be until few dacades to digital today.
The huge shift of communication from physical to digital, changes the whole essence of basic life, hence I believe at least the distorted sharing should be encouraged on the Internet (file movies and programs sharing) should be considered normal and not illegal.. I believe Using Free Software instead of non-free (proprietary) one is another thing through which we can stimulate sharing. If we as society appreciate our freedom at all and care for our children future, it is my firm conviction, we should do best to keep sharing as much as we can in both physical and digital sense.
As a person interested in history and antrophology. Just recently on my last trip to Romania as I travelled a very interesting question poped up in my mind – How it happened that RoadSigns we use on every street highway and practically everywhere on the road came to be. Interestingly now with the standartization of road signs often the most popular road signs are used as a basis for development on other popular prohibit or allowance signs, we read on airports public institutions, pubs and mostly everywhere.
So in short I did a short research on Road Sign History, just to find out once again that the ancients, were wiser than we think. The first road signs probably came to existence with the existence of humanity, however officially, there was no standartization of using signs to point on road locations travellers before it was introudced in the Roman Empire. In Rome a pillars on the roads were placed to point to major road arteries leading to Rome and various important empire city centers.
During the middle ages, milestones pillars were no longer used, but for practical reasons wooden markers placed across european cities instructed tradesman and travellers to major city important centers and were used to show a general road direction leading to nearby city. The wooden signs practice had been in use until the first modern roadsigns erected on a wide scale designed for riders of 'high' and ordinary bicycles in the late 1870 and 1880s. The modern road signs as we know it today however emerged as a result of the first International Road Congress meeting that occured in Rome in 1908. On the meeting a four standard pictures were selected to note the basic for road signs further development. The need for the meeting was the large increase of roads across european artery cities. The road signs developed on the meeting were bump, curve, intersection and railroad crossings. The invention and adoption of cars and the boom of the car producing industry quickened the need for international road sign standard. The intensive work on international road signs that took place between 1926 and 1949 eventually led to the development of the European road sign system as we know it. The signs were quicky spread to America and in 1960, the road signs become universal in America and almost everywhere all around the developed and developing world.
As of today 2012 it can be said road signs exist all around the civilized world.Though most of road signs are identical across all countries around the world today still some road symbols varies from country to country. I remember seeing some very unique road signs during my travelling through Serbia, 2 years ago.
We're living at a times, where information has become more valuable than money and gold. Though we're living in a such a wild changing times, still it is not easy to answer in onefold clear way what is information. The more the world and humanity developed the more meanings information word accepted. While checking some interesting videos on the net, I've come across a video representing in a very brief form the history of information.
The Story of Information and how we come to be at where we are now
We're living at a times, where information has become more valuable than money and gold. Lest that living in a such a wild changing times, still it is not easy to answer in onefold clear way what is information. As you can see from the video, the more the world and humanity developed the more meanings information word took up.
At the end end of the short presentational video there are few questions asked:
Who coined the term MEME
How many zeros are in yottabyte?
What is a one thing that can escape a black hole?
I did a quick research on the newly heard words and came to know meme concept. A meme is an "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.". The theory lists some interesting information like replication of personality (propagation) from one person to another etc. etc. However the general content of meme's theory puts Christian faith, religions and all kind of people beliefs in the graph of being just a continuous meme's patterns which are transferred from a person to person (generation to generation). Therefore according to memetics (as the meme's science is called), Christian faith and even my Orthodox Christian faith is just an informtion transmitted similarly to genetics information and the laws against:; sexual morality, bestiality, adultery, castration etc. are just a taboo and makes not sense and is just they claim is a information transferred from family generation to next generation until today.
Obviously the whole "theory" of memetics as a science is not true and is just a world view of Mr. Richard Dawkins in a book called The Selfish Gene (1976). It is well to be said Dawkins a follower of the fairy tales of Charle's Darwin's Darwinism. Modern science however is seriously questioning Darwin's materialist world view. There are plenty of scientific researches which has prooved the existence of spiritual realm and hence some of the claims memetics are standing on a shaky grounds.
Concerning the second question in the video how many zeros are in an yottabyte the answer according to FreeFactFinder.com is:
So having in mind the yottabyte equals 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes if in bytes it would have 2 zeros 🙂
But if by zero is meant the number of values which could become zeroes then the answer would be 24 zeroes. This of course is in bytes in zettabytes the zeroes are only 0 or 3i.e.(1024 zettabytes) 🙂
Moving back to the 3rd video question What is a one thing that can escape a black hole?. The answer is "WHO KNOWS ??". The BlackHoles are a matter of science based on a huge theory base, there are plenty of discussions by some scientists still doubting if black holes really exist ,,, even if we assume blackholes exist noone can tell if the blackhole would suck up all matter (including light) or some specific kind of still un-researched matter or energy can get out… In short the question imposed is completely ridiculously funny 😉
After about 3 years of no new version for GNU / Linux finally Skype has released a new version of Skype. I thought already there will be never a new skype version out for GNU / Linux, since the moment Microsoft purchased skype.
As of time of writting this post there are Skype 4 versions for following Linux-es;;;
Ubuntu 10.04 32 / 64-bit (probably would work fine on latest Ubuntus too)
Debian 6.0 Squeeze 32 / 64-bit
Fedora 16 / 32 bit
OpenSUSE 12.1 32bit (only)
Most likely the Ubuntu release of skype 4 will work flawlessly on Linux Mint and other debian derivatives.The The release mentions, Skype 4 is supposed to have 4 major advancements and the gap in interface and usability with latest Mac OS and M$ Windows Skype versions is now filled.The four major changes said in the announcement are;;;
1. a new Conversations View where users can easily track all of their chats in a unified window. Those users who prefer the old view can disable this in the Chat options;
2. a brand new Call View;
3.Call quality has never been better thanks to several investments we made in improving audio quality;
4. Improved video call quality and extended support for more cameras.
Some of the minor improvements in those
new Linux skype
are:- improved chat synchronization- new presence and emoticon icons- the ability to store and view phone numbers in a Skype contact's profile- much lower chance Skype for Linux will crash or freeze- chat history loading is now much faster- support for two new languages: Czech (flag:cz) and Norwegian (flag:no)Just like with prior Skype releases 2.0 and 2.2beta this release comes with almost same list of non-english language support ,,,Seeing those announcement, I've hurried to download and test skype 4 on my 64-bit desktop running Debian 6 Squeeze.Once downloaded to install the pack skype-debian_4.0.0.7-1_amd64.deb I used the usual dpkg -i i,e,;;;noah:~# dpkg -iskype-debian_4.0.0.7-1_amd64.deb…………..Just like the release announcement mentions the first initial launch of Skype 4 took about 3 or 4 minutes doing something (probably sending half of my hard disk data to Microsoft 🙂 🙂 🙂 ) along with importing the prior skype data and chat history :)The minimum software dependencies for correct operation of Skype are:Qt libraries; D-Bus; libasound and pulseaudioHere are few screenshots of Skype 4 to give you an idea what to expect:The Skype Options is almost identical to Skype 2.2. One interesting new feature I've noticed is Skype WIFIUnfortunately to use Skype WIFI you need to have purchased skype credits.Another notable difference is the organization of Skype Chats, which is more like in the good old times of mIRC and IRC chat clientsHere is also the list of Skype emoticons including bundled with Skype 4:The "look & feel" of the new interface gives the impression of seriously improved Skype client stability too.There was a minor trouble with the voice recording (microphone) with Skype 4;To make the microphone work properly I had to raise up the mic volume from PulseAudio settings in Skype options.Well that's all the only unpleasent thing for this new skype is it is using KDE's libQT and seems not to have a native interface for GNOME via GTK2. If we put away this I guess this version of Skype is much more stable and therefore I would recommend anyone to update.Of course we never know if this new updated more stable Skype release is not filled up with backdoors or does not transfer all our conversations to microsoft but we didn't know that even when Skype was not Microsoft's so and since it is not a free software I guess it doesn't matter so much.As you can guess Microsoft has imposed centralization on Skype protocol so connecting the peers is now done by Microsoft servers this news is another intriguing one.According to one recent article from May 1, 2012 Microsoft Skype replaces the Peer-to-Peer P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft – In short that probably means that by changing this nowdays microsoft probably now logs all chat sessions between Skype users, even it is likely the calls between users are recorded too. We all know Microsoft imperialism pretty well so I guess this is not a big news …..This new release of Skype if it is significantly more stable than it is prior releases would certainly have serious positive implication on the development and adoption of Linux for the Desktop. So far I'm sure one of the obstacles of many manufacturers of notebooks and comp equipment to ship with Linux was the lack of a stable and easy to implement skype release for Linux.Well that's all folks. Enjoy the New Skype Cheeres ! 🙂
I'm a guy fascinated by ASCII art, since the very early days I saw a piece of this awesome digital art.
As time passed and computers went to be used mostly graphics resolution, ASCII art loose its huge popularity from the early DOS and BBS (internet primordial days).
However, this kind of art is still higly valued by true computer geeks. In that manner of thoughts, lately I'm researching widely on ASCII art tools and ASCII art open source tools available for Linux. Last time I check what is available for 'ASCII job' was before 5 years time. Recently I decided to review once again and see if there are new software for doing ascii manipulations on Linux and this is how this article got born.
My attention was caught by aewan (ASCII-art Editor Without A Name), while searching for ASCII keyword description packages with:
Here is the complete description of the Debian package:
hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show aewan|grep -i description -A 5
Description: ASCII-art Editor Without A Name
aewan is an ASCII art editor with support for multiple layers that can be
edited individually, colors, rectangular copy and paste, and intelligent
horizontal and vertical flipping (converts '\' to '/', etc). It produces
both stand-alone art files and an easy-to-parse format for integration
into your terminal applications.
I installed it to give it a try:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install aewan
Selecting previously deselected package aewan.
(Reading database ... 388522 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking aewan (from .../aewan_1.0.01-3_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up aewan (1.0.01-3) ...
2. aecat is utility to display an aewan documents (aewan format saved files)3. aemakeflic – tool to produce an animation from an aewan document
Next I ran it in plain console tty to check how it is like:
hipo@noah:~$ aewan
Below are screenshots to give you an idea how powerful aewan ASCII art editor is:
Aewan immediate entry screen after start up
Aewan ASCII art editor – all of the supported tool functions
As you can see from the shot the editor is very feature rich. I was stunned to find out it even supports layers (in ASCII!!) (w0w!). It even has a Layers Manager (like GIMP) 🙂
To create my first ASCII art I used the:
New
menu.
This however didn't immediately show the prompt, where I can type the ascii characters to draw my picture. In order to be able to draw inside the editor, its necessary to open at least one layer, through using the menu:
Add Layer (defaults)
then the interactive ASCII art editor appeared.
While an ASCII art is created with the editor you can select the color of the input characters by using Drawing Color menu seen in the above screenshot.
I've played few minutes and created a sample ascii art, just to test the color and editor "look & feel", my conclusions are the editor chars drawing is awesome.
All the commands available via menus are also accessible via a shortcut key combinations:
aewan controls are just great and definitely over-shadows every other text editor I used to draw an ASCII art so far. Once saved the ASCII art, are by default saved in a plain gzipped ascii text. You can therefore simply zcat the the saves; Don't expect zcat to show you the ascii as they're displayed in aewan, zcat-ing it will instead display just the stored meta data; the meta data is interpreted and displayed properly only with aecat command.
I've checked online for rpm builds too and such are available, so installing on Fedora, CentOS, SuSE etc. is up to downloading the right distro / hardware architecture rpm package and running:
# rpm -ivh aewan*.rpm
On the official website, there are also instructions to compile from source, Slackware users and users of other distros which doesn't have a package build should compile manually with the usual:
$ tar -zxf aewan-1.0.01.tar.gz
$ cd aewan-1.0.01
$ ./configure
$ make
$ su -c "make install"
For those inrested to make animations with aemakeflic you need to first save a multiple layers of pictures. The idea of creating ASCII art video is pretty much like the old school way to make animation "draw every scene" and movie it. Once all different scene layers of the ASCII art animation are prepared one could use aemakeflic to export all the ASCII layers as common video.
aemakeflic has the ability to export the ASCII animation in a runnable shell script to display the animation. The other way aemakeflic can be used is to produce a picture in kind of text format showing the video whether seen with less cmd. Making ASCII animation takes a lot of time and effort. Since i'm too lazy and I lack the time I haven't tested this functionality. Anyways I've seen some ascii videos on telnet to remote hosts (some past time); therefore I guess they were made using aewan and later animated with aemakeflic.
I will close this post with a nice colorful ASCII art, made with aewan (picture is taken from the project page):
Probably, many don't know that it is possible to view normal graphical pictures (JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP) etc. in plain console tty.
Being able to view pictures in ASCII is something really nice especially for console geeks like me. The images produced sometimes are a bit unreadable, if compared to the original graphics, but anyways most of the pictures looks pretty decent 🙂
Viewing in console / terminal images on GNU / Linux is possible thanks to a library called libcaca, caca labs libcaca project official website here. Below is a shot description of libcaca: hipo@noah:~$ apt-cache show libcaca0|grep 'Description' -A 4
Description: colour ASCII art library
libcaca is the Colour AsCii Art library. It provides high level functions
for colour text drawing, simple primitives for line, polygon and ellipse
drawing, as well as powerful image to text conversion routines.
In Debian, Ubuntu and other deb Linux distros viewing GUI images with no need for Xserver or any kind of window manager in plain ASCII is possible with cacaview.
cacaview is part of a package called caca-utils. caca-utils is providing few other great utilities for ASCII freaks 🙂 along with cacaview console ascii viewer prog. The package> is available for Debian distributins since many years, so even on a very old Debians like Debian – (Potato, Woody, Sarge) the package is available in default free package repositories ready to install via apt
To install apt-get it as usual:
noah:~# apt-get --yes install caca-utils
Here is a list of the binaries the package provides:
1. cacaserver a tiny program allowing network streaming of applications written in caca
Belkow is a chop, from man cacaserver
cacaserver reads libcaca animation files in its standard input and serves them as ANSI art on network port 51914. These animations can be created by any libcaca program by setting the CACA_DRIVER environment variable to raw and piping the program's standard output to cacaserver.
Clients can then connect to port 51914 using telnet or netcat to see the output.
The example section of the manual points 1 example use of cacaserver to stream the console output from cacademo. cacademo binary is a short presentation ASCII DEMO in the spirit of the old school assembly demos (demoscene) . To run it to bind on port 51914 one has to type in bash shell: hipo@noah:~$ CACA_DRIVER=raw cacademo | cacaserver
initialised network, listening on port 51914
Then to check out how the demo looks, open telnet connection to the cacaserver host; In my case the cacaserver is binded and streamed over IP 192.168.0.2:
hipo@debian:~$ telnet 192.168.0.2 51914
Immediately you got the demo shining; Below are two screenshots of the demo played after succesful telnet connection:
cacademo running over telnet network connection – Matrix
Blur spots cacademo shot of cacademo streamed via network
You see the demo looks quite awesome 🙂
2. Running cacafire to stream over network
Another possible example use of cacaserver is in conjunction with cacafire libcaca test application:
noah:~# CACA_DRIVER=raw cacafire | cacaserver
initialised network, listening on port 51914 cacafire is a short application written to render ASCII via libcaca and is just displaying a screen with ASCII (moving) burning fire. It is quite spectacular if you, ask an unexpecting friend to connect to your host to 51914 🙂
Besides that bored sys admins, could run cacafire in console to hypnotize themselves watching dumb the burning fire screen for few hoursor just use it as a screensaver 😉
3. cacaview a program to display a graphic images in console using ASCII art
cacaview takes just one argument – the picture to be displayed.
Below is a screenshot of cacaview ran from my gnome-terminaldisplaying a ASCII text version of the MySQL server logo
hipo@noah:~$ cd /disk/pictures
hipo@noah:/disk/pictures$ cacaview mysql_logo.png
Whether cacaview is invoked in GUI, the libcaca X support is used, so the text image is visualized in new window with graphics, if however it is invoked in plain let's say tty1 libcaca displays the graphics pictures drawing it with only text characters.
Here is also a screenshot, I've made while viewing a GIF website logo in ASCII in plain tty console:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/logo.gif
The logo is in cyrillic, so for latin speaking people some of the characters in the two words seen will be unreadable 🙂
cacaview even supports viewing, the next and previous picture in line, like in any modern graphics image viewer program. To view a bunch of graphic pictures in ASCII with cacaview pass it *.*:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*.*
For simplicity the common unix * is also supported, so I find it quicker to do:
hipo@noah:~$ cacaview /disk/pictures/*
Showing pictures forward and backward (Previous / Next) picture is done with n and p kbd keys, whether; n - next;
p - previous
cacaview doesn't crash or stop but skip unknown file formats – if for instance encounters filenames which are not images; lets say you have *.rar archive files along with other pictures.
The complete list of keys cacaview supports are: br />
KEYS ? show the help screen
n, p switch to next image, previous image
Left, Right, Up, Down or h, l, k, j scroll the image around
+, – zoom in and out
z reset the zoom level to normal
f switch fullscreen mode (hide/show menu and status bars)
d toggle the dithering mode (no dithering, 4×4 ordered dithering, 8×8 ordered dithering and random dithering)
q exit the program
4. Converting graphics images to ASCII art like (plain text pictures)
The tool that does "the trick" is img2txt. img2txt has a bit more options while compared to the rest of the aforementioned tools.The following list of arguments are recognized:
the size (font, height)
brightness
contrast
gamma and dither
format type of out the output pic
Anyways I found that the basic just in / out arguments passed are enough to produce pretty good results:
After above img2txt command is run and hipo_avatar_pic.txt to see the colorful output ASCII art img2txt produces, cat it:
hipo@noah:~$ cat hipo_avatar_pic.txt
The image result if screenshot looks quite beautiful and even, can be considered or used as an ART effect image (filter) 🙂
The picture colors are plain ANSI color, so in order to display properly the picture with colors on another computers or Operating System you will need at least basic support for ANSI colors.
Plenty of output file formats are supported by img2txt
Here is the complete list of supported output formats:
ansi : coloured ANSI caca : internal libcaca format utf8 : UTF8 with CR utf8 : UTF8 with CRLF (MS Windows) html : HTML with CSS and DIV support html3 : Pure HTML3 with tables irc : IRC with ctrl-k codes bbfr : BBCode (French) ps : Postscript svg : Scalable Vector Graphics tga : Targa Image
libcaca is available for FreeBSD too, but the caca-utils is not available as a port yet, though probably the deb or rpm packages can easily be ported to BSD.
After finding out How PC Speaker is muted on Linux , I've decided to also disable the annoying beeps on BSD. This is in tandem with the minimalistic philosophy I try to apply to every server I manage.
Also on BSD Desktop machines it is quite annoying especially if csh (C Shell) is used, everytime you press TAB you get the beep sound. On BSD beep sound produced on tab completion is louder than in Linux and that makes it even more annoying …
Disabling pc-speaker beeps on BSDs is done via a sysctl kernel variable:
A PC Speaker is helpful as it could be used as a tool for diagnosing system hardware failures (different systems produce different beep sequences depending on the machine BIOS type). Using the instructions for the respective BIOS vendor and version one could determine the type of problem experienced by a machine based on the sequence and frequency of sounds produced by the SPEAKER. Lets say a hardware component on a server is down with no need for a monitor or screen to be attached you can say precisely if it is the hard drive, memory or fan malfunctioning…
Generally speaking historically embedded PC Speaker was inseparatable part of the Personal Computers, preceding the soundblasters, now this is changing but for compitability sake many comp equipment vendors still produce machines with pc-speaker in. Some newer machines (mostly laptops) are factory produced with no PC-SPEAKER component anymore. For those who don't know what is PC SPEAKER, it is a hardware device capable of emitting very simple short beep sounds at certain system occasions.
Talking about PC-Speaker, it reminds me of the old computer days, where we used pc-speakers to play music in DOS quite frequently. It was wide practice across my friends and myself to use the pc-speaker to play Axel Folly and other mod files because we couldn't afford to pay 150$ for a sound cards. Playing a song over pc-speaker is quite a nice thing and it will be a nice thing if someone writes a program to be able to play songs on Linux via the pc-speaker for the sake of experiment.
As of time of writting, I don't know of any application capable of playing music files via the pc-speaker if one knows of something like this please, drop me a comment..
As long as it is used for hardware failure diagnosis the speaker is useful, however there are too many occasions where its just creating useless annoying sounds. For instance whether one uses a GUI terminal or console typing commands and hits multiple times backspace to delete a mistyped command. The result is just irritating beeps, which could be quite disturbing for other people in the room (for example if you use Linux as Desktop in heterogeneous OS office). When this "unplanned" glitchering beeps are experienced 100+ times a day you really want to break the computer, as well as your collegues are starting to get mad (if not using their headphones) 🙂
Hence you need sometimes to turn off the pc-speaker to save some nerves.
Here is how this is done on major Linux distros.
On Debian and most other distros, the PC SPEAKER is controlled by a kernel module, so to disable communication with the speaker you have to remove the kernel module.
On Debian and Fedora disabling pcspeaker is done with:
# modprobe -r pcspkr
Then to permanently disable load of the pcspkr module on system boot:
The broadcast and gateway configuration lines are not obligitory. dns-nameservers would re-create /etc/resolv.conf file with the nameserver values specified which in these case are Google Public DNS servers and OpenDNS servers.
Very important variable is allow-hotplug eth0 If these variable with eth0 lan interface is omitted or missing (due to some some weird reason), the result would be the output you see from the command below:
debian:~# /etc/init.d/networking restart
Running /etc/init.d/networking restart is deprecated because it may not enable again some interfaces ... (warning).
Reconfiguring network interfaces...
Besides the /etc/init.d/networking restart is deprecated because it may not enable again some interfaces … (warning). , if the allow-hotplug eth0 variable is omitted the eth0 interface would not be brough up on next server boot or via the networking start/stop/restart init script.
My first reaction when I saw the message was that probably I’ll have to use invoke-rc.d, e.g.: debian:~# invoke-rc.d networking restart
Running invoke-rc.d networking restart is deprecated because it may not enable again some interfaces ... (warning).
However as you see from above’s command output, running invoke-rc.d helped neither.
I was quite surprised with the inability to bring my network up for a while with the networking init script. Interestingly using the command:
debian:~# ifup eth0
was able to succesfully bring up the network interface, whether still invoke-rc.d networking start failed.
After some wondering I finally figured out that the eth0 was not brought up by networking init script, because auto eth0 or allow-hotplug eth0 (which by the way are completely interchangable variables) were missing.
I added allow-hotplug eth0 and afterwards the networking script worked like a charm 😉
I never liked Mandrake Linux, since day 1 I saw it. Historically Mandrake Linux was one of the best Linux distributions available for free download in the "Linux scene" some 10 to 12 years ago.
Mandrake was simple gui oriented and trendy. It also one the Linux distribution with the most simplified installer program and generally a lot of GUI software for easy configuration and use by the end user.
Though it's outside nice look, still for me it was like an "intuition" that Mandrake is not so good as it appeared.
Now many years later I found by chance that Mandrake has been sued to change their Operating System name with another, due to a law suit requit by the copyright holders of Mandrake The Magician comics. "Mandrake the Magician" used to be a very popular before the Second World war in the 1930's.
It obviously not a co-incidence that the Mandrake names was after this comics and not the mandrake herb plants available in Europe, Africa and Asia. This is clear in Mandrake Linux distro earlier mascot, you see below:
Later on they changed Mandrake's logo to loose the connection with Mandrake The Magician and used another new crafted logo:
Its quite stunning nowdays magician obsession, has so heavily infiltrated our lives that even something like a Free Softwre Linux distribution might have some kind of reference to magician and occult stuff (I saw this from the position of being Christian) …
Later due to the name copyright infringement Mandrake Linux was renamed first to Mandragora Linux. Instead of putting some nice name non related to occultism or magic stuff the French commercian company behind Mandrake rename it to another non-Christian name Mandragora. Interestingly the newer name Mandragora as one can read in wikipedia means:
Mandragora (demon), in occultism
Well apparently, someone from the head developers of this Linux distribution has a severe obsession with magic and occultism.
Later MandrakeSoft (The French Company behind Mandrake Linux) renamed finally the distribution to Mandriva under the influence of the merger of Mandrake with the Brazillian company Connectiva this put also an over to the legal dispute copyright infringement dispute with Hearst Corporation (owning the rights of Mandrake the Magician).
Having in mind all fact on current Mandriva "dark names history", I think it is better we Christians avoid it …
