Happy new Mageia

First, let’s get the niceties out of the way… the Mageia team would like to wish you all a very happy New Year, for you and your families :D. We really hope that 2011 will be the Mageia year for users, contributors and partners so that we can propose and promote a rock solid and innovative open source environment.

While we are speaking about the future, the new year comes with the start of the real work!

Packaging

During past Wednesday’s packagers’ meeting, Mageia packaging tasks have been launched. First packages will be imported in the coming days by about 40 packagers. This goes together with starting the mentoring of new packagers so that every proposal of contributions we received since the beginning can turn into a positive effort. You can join the #mageia-mentoring channel on the Freenode IRC network to discuss all aspects of this subject. In the mean time, 2 representatives have been elected for the packaging team leadership.

Our Buildsystem, which is a corner stone of the project, is being updated/wrapped up by the sysadmin team and with the great help of Pascal Terjan (if you meet him, be sure to buy him a beer :)). We will give you more details about the buildsystem deployment later on.

Translations

In the translators/i18n team, basic steps of building up the translation process and workflow have been made. Currently teams are establishing two general translation workflows (one with Transifex and one without it) and we will be ready to start soon. The i18n teams expect that once the whole infrastructure is set (soon) that they’ll gather more contributors to join the teams, former experts and new volunteers alike. In short: i18n is on track!

Web

The Web team is still lagging a bit behind schedule for the new Wiki and Forum instances launch. But this will be done this month, January. The whole infrastructure is making progress slowly (Bugzilla, www, maintainers, account management, calendar, code repositories).

Communication & Marketing

Well… as you may see, we are not very active yet on this, although it is building up slowly as well. Once we have a product ready to be put out the door, marketing will start in earnest.

Alpha 0 release

So we are on track for our first technical release this month. As announced before, of course, do not expect this alpha release to be more than what it is: an alpha release. Things will be way more interesting in the coming months.

FOSDEM

On February 5th and 6th, some of us will meet at FOSDEM in Brussels and will enjoy meetings and discussions with a lot of other happy Free Software hackers!