Wikipedia
Conectiva was a company founded on August 28, 1995, in Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil, by a group of friends, among them Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo, who was a pioneer in the distribution of Linux and open source software in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and English for all of Latin America. Besides a customized Linux distribution for the Latin American market, Conectiva developed a series of products and additional services directed to meet the market demand for open source tools, including books, manuals, additional software like Linux Tools and embedded systems, OEM programs, applications port, training kits and the "Revista do Linux" Linux magazine. In addition, the company provided consulting services, training and technical support in all of Latin America through its own service centers and certified partners.
Conectiva also provided development, customization and professional services on a worldwide basis through its team of open source software engineers. Conectiva's development team had expertise in, amongst others, the following areas: Linux kernel development, high availability, device drivers, XFree86, network protocols, firewalling, clustering, performance analysis and optimisation, filesystems and resource management.
On 24 January 2005 it was announced that Mandrakesoft had acquired Conectiva for 1.79 million euro (2.3 million U.S. dollars at the time). On 7 April 2005 Mandrakesoft announced the decision to change the name of the parent company to Mandriva and their distribution name to Mandriva Linux, although the Brazilian operation would not change its name from Conectiva immediately.