Mandriva Club

Where is the Club?

The Club is dead, long live the Club!

The old Club was a mixture of commercial services (including downloads of commercial Mandriva editions) and a community site. The commercial side has now been split out into a standalone subscription service which allows you to download the Powerpack edition of two Mandriva Linux distributions per year at a single fixed price, while the Club is now simply the community of Mandriva users, with no paid memberships: access is free to all.

Just register at https://my.mandriva.com and you get access to all the free community services:

• access to free online training courses: 25 free training modules available at http://etraining.mandriva.com
• access to free technical support from the Mandriva Expert community service
• write access to the forum and its community of knowledgeable users and its 3 Mandriva Trained Admins (awilliamson, RJ and imr (french monkey))
• Free Official Documentation
• a free blog space on the Mandriva Club platform
• a subscription to the Mandriva Newsletter containing security alerts, new package announcements, product releases and special offers

Are you a Mandriva user? Then you're a member of the Mandriva community. Registered for a free account at https://my.mandriva.com? You're a member of the new free Club.

Welcome aboard!

What advantage does this change bring, apart from the new Powerpack subscription prices?

The mix of commercial and community in the old Club system was posing problems to many users and many parts of the Mandriva and Linux communities.

Some people did not want to lend support to a commercial endeavor, and some saw the Club as a mean to control and manipulate the community. Now that the situation is clear, nothing will prevent us from rolling out services that benefit the Mandriva and Linux communities, bringing all users together and reducing divisions in the Mandriva community. This will also mean areas of the Mandriva community and and individual users will be able to work closely with us in order to bring community managed services to their fellow users.

Where do I renew my Standard / Silver / Gold membership?

The separate levels of membership no longer exist. These reflected different levels of commercial services, but since the commercial service is now separated from the idea of Club membership and does not have different levels, the only remaining purpose of the separate levels would be to show the level of support to the distribution.

However, since the philosophy of Free Software is to make all their users equal in rights, whether they be developers, artists, packagers, contributors or end users, we felt that keeping a separation based on this premise was going against this philosophy - a position shared by many of our users. So we felt the right thing to do, since Mandriva has always been faithful to the philosophy of Free Software, was to completely remove the separate levels.

You can renew your Club membership and convert it into a Powerpack subscription if your Club membership has expired. Just click on "manage your membership" while you are logged into the Club.

Where can I renew my monthly payment membership? What happens to monthly payments?

Monthly payments are no longer available. We have stopped debiting users who were previously on a monthly subscription. The new subscription service is a lot cheaper than the previous Silver membership, while providing the same services. However, unfortunately this means we can't maintain the monthly payment system, as it wouldn't be commercially viable. Because of banking fees, we would end up charging substantially more for the monthly payment than for the subscription. This is the same reason monthly payment was not available for Standard memberships under the old system. We hope that users who previously held a monthly payment subscription will not have any trouble in finding the smaller annual fee for the new Powerpack subscription service.

I am a paid member of the Club. What will happen to my Club membership after the new Powerpack subscription service is launched?

Standard members: Your Standard membership becomes a Powerpack subscription. If you had 50 days left of Standard membership left, you have now 50 days of Powerpack subscription left. Silver members: Your Silver membership is converted to a Powerpack subscription but you now have twice as much time remaining. If you had 50 days left of Silver membership left, you have now 100 days of Powerpack subscription left. Gold and Platinum members: please contact us to arrange a plan to convert your membership to the new system.

What about the Discovery and Powerpack+ editions of Mandriva Linux?

From Mandriva Linux 2008 onwards, these editions are merged into the Powerpack edition. There will now be only a single commercial edition of Mandriva Linux.