All grown up and ready to go dancing: Mageia 3′s out!

We still can’t believe how much fun it is to make Mageia together, and we’ve been doing it for two and a half years.

For people who can’t wait, get it here; release notes are here. To upgrade from Mageia 2, see here.

business_cardBefore we get to the rest of the information: we dedicate this release to the memory of Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration to those he left behind. We miss his brilliance, his courtesy and his dedication.

 What’s new in Mageia 3?

You can take a look at the complete list of packages upgraded from Mageia 2, by checking the Mageia Apps Database:

Major new features

  • Updates to RPM (4.11) and urpmi, which has been given a good Mageia turnout and cleanup
  • Kernel 3.8
  • systemd 195
  • GRUB is the default bootloader; GRUB2 is available to test.
  • Revamped package groupings for installation and rpmdrake
  • KDE 4.10.2
  • GNOME 3.6.
  • Xfce 4.10
  • Libreoffice 4.0.3

AND: Steam for linux!
See the Release Notes and Mageia App DB for the complete list.

Why choose Mageia?

Community

We all work together – to make the best distribution we can, and to help each other. Come and join us, and make some of the best friends you’ll ever meet – on IRC, on the Forums, in any of the teams, on Google+ , on Facebook – or follow us on Twitter.

Open Support

Mageia’s bug reporting system is open to everyone, as are the mailing lists and community support. That makes it easier for you to have your voice heard and follow what is happening. And access to our fully tested and prompt security updates is free of charge for everyone.

Looking good!

You’ll notice that we have updated our logo! Thanks to Nicolas Duval for this great design. Still Mageia, still the cauldron, but with a real Mageia quirk…

New Mageia logo - dark version

New Mageia logo

Thanks again to Leo for our great new background. Mageia’s Atelier team hopes you’ll like our new look as much as we liked making it.

Mageia-Default-1024x600

We couldn’t do it without…

Our heartfelt thanks go to all the people who donated their time to make this release possible, and all the people who donated money allowing us to buy the servers that we use to build the distribution.

All of us Mageians have been depending on Gandi and Ielo, who have been quietly sponsoring Mageia since the begining of the project. Gandi has been providing us machines on their cloud infrastructure that we use to host the blog and the website. Ielo has been providing space in their datacenter, and the network connection, to host all our other servers that we use for all the Mageia infrastructure such as the packages build system, bug tracker, mailing lists, main mirror, etc… Thank you!

Welcome to Mageia 3!

Posted in Mageia, release | 65 Comments

Mageia European tour 2013

Mageia will be present at the major European Linux events this year, as we have done in previous years.

We have already attended FOSDEM, where we held our general assembly.

In the coming weeks, the tour will go on.

The first event will be Linuxtag in Berlin (Germany). Linuxtag is the leading Open Source and Linux event in Europe. This year is the 19th Linuxtag and the 7th that will take place at the Berlin fair grounds. Linuxtag will take place from May 22nd until May 25th.

Mageia will have a booth there, where we will present the project and the brand new Mageia 3 release. You will have the chance to meet us there, and ask us any questions about the project you always wanted to ask!
As usual, we will have a Mageia dinner on Friday evening. If you want to join us there, just come by our booth and ask us about the place and time.

After Linuxtag, we will be at Solutions Linux in Paris (France), which will take place on May 28th and May 29th. You will be able to meet some of the supporters and developpers of your favorite distribution and get some goodies like tee-shirts or stickers… and of course discover Mageia 3 release!

And that’s not all! Mageia people will also attend RMLL in Bruxelles (Belgium), which will take place from July 6th to July 11th at the ULB.

And then we will be at FrOSCon on August 24th and 25th. FrOSCon is organized by the students of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg near Cologne (Germany).

The last event of this year’s tour will be OpenRheinRuhr on November 9th and 10th at the industry museum in Oberhausen (Germany).

Posted in events | 2 Comments

Mageia Days – meeting each other in person

On a daily basis, the Mageia community uses a variety of communication tools such as mailing-lists, IRC and forums. In addition to our online presence, we think we definitely need to have direct meetings so that Mageia people can meet each other and speak directly. Knowing each other better in real life can help our daily communication to work better.

So: we are planning 2 Mageia days during RMLL in July. These days will be dedicated to discussions around Mageia’s organization and the forthcoming release. Here are the proposed topics:

  • Technical specifications for Mageia 4
  • Mageia organization: how to improve our current organization?
  • Managing relationships with local communities
  • Packaging training for beginners
  • Bug triaging for beginners
  • QA for beginners
  • Working on Mageia visibility

We are checking at the moment how many people could be around to participate. The date would be 8th and 9th of july in Bruxelles.

If you are interested in it please add your name here:  Mageia Days on the wiki

Posted in events, i18n, Mageia, packager, QA, users | 4 Comments

Planned maintenance on Mageia servers this weekend

An important set of Mageia servers will be taken offline this weekend
for maintenance. Ielo.net, a French network provider, has been sponsoring
the Mageia project
by providing hosting for our servers since the beginning
of the project. The room in Marseille where the Mageia servers are
currently located has to be closed, and our servers will be moved this weekend to a
different room in another building. We will take this opportunity to
add more disks to the build system, which are needed to host the new Mageia
releases.

The following services will be unavailable for a few hours this weekend:

The following services will remain operational:

To continue working on the coming release and to contact contributors during the
downtime, please use the IRC channels, as they will be unaffected. A good place
to start is #mageia on irc.freenode.net.

We will update this post to report progress of the operation.

Update: new disks have been added, and servers moved, so everything should be back online. Thanks to maka from Ielo for coming to datacenter on saturday evening and help moving the servers.

Posted in sysadmin | 4 Comments

New release date for Mageia 3

After some thought and discussions it was decided to delay the Mageia 3 final release until the 18th of May.

We still have some release blocker bugs to fix, meaning bugs which cannot be fixed after release through updates. They are mainly to do with the installer, hardware detection and the installation media.

We could say “Mageia will be released when it’s ready” but we would look like a copycat :)

Packagers and QA team are on the case and doing all the hard work so that you have a great Mageia 3 release!

Thankyou for all your testing and bug reports! We are a community and you are an important part of it. You have helped to make Mageia. Feels good doesn’t it? If you would like to get more involved in making Mageia, please do so.  Take a look here for some ideas, there are all sorts of teams to join and you don’t need to be overly technical to get involved. You would be very welcome..

Posted in Mageia, packager, QA, release, test | 34 Comments