Mandriva is the name of LinuxDistribution published by a French company called MandrivaSoft.

Originally known as Mandrake, they changed their name after buying Brazilian distribution Conectiva, thus settling a long-standing court case with the owners of the Mandrake The Magician trademark.

Mandrake was originally forked from RedHatLinux to replace its default GNOME DesktopEnvironment with KDE. Since then, their paths have diverged substantially, and while they're both RPM based, packages for one system will not work on the other.

Mandriva has a reputation of being good for beginners, although it has lately lost mindshare to Ubuntu.

Part of CategoryDistribution.