Starting with Mageia: download it!

As promised, the first ISO of Mageia, Alpha 1 (code name Cantine) should be available soon on a mirror near you (or rather, on a mirror on the same planet as you): 32 bits DVD iso and 64 bits DVD iso (live CD will come for next releases). Another piece of good news, we have put all the rpms on the mirrors so fearless developers and testers can do an upgrade from their Mandriva Linux 2010.2 systems. (You may try upgrading from Cooker, but be aware of the various rpm5 issues). Anyway, Mageia will only guarantee upgrading from 2010.2 for the final release, so upgrade from Cooker at your own risk!).

As explained in a previous blog post, this development release should not be used in production. It’s not for regular users and not for reviewers either: it is not ready for that at this point. For now, it is mostly directed to Mageia contributors.This is the very first alpha release of Mageia and a kind of preview of it. This is the result of 2 months of hard work, setting up the Build System and cleaning packages and softwares, as explained in this blog post. That’s why you will not find all your favourite applications available (yet :)). Packages are imported one by one and progressively after some cleaning. That’s also why you may find some part of the system quite rough, or not as pretty as expected. The new design is not fully integrated yet and we have many temporary images and icons that will be replaced in the coming weeks for the final release. The Artwork team is working hard on it, and already produced a significant part of the work as you can see in the installer and the graphical boot theme.

We know that this release may not impress you that much, nor will it bring anything revolutionary for the moment and this is not one of our goals yet; as we first plan to have a rock solid factory and system.

Releasing this first ISO as it is now means that:

  • We have our own repositories ready, with cleaned up packages and our own policies (software media changes, management of licenses);
  • We have our own build system up and running (and it’s running rather well);
  • Packagers are working hard, and about 4800 packages, updated, made it through the build system;
  • We did bootstrap our own distribution;
  • We got a working ISO to run and install;
  • We have a basic working operating system.
  • In a few words: the power switch is on, the factory is working, teams are organized and all this enables us to deliver a minimum working product, in its first form.

Since the first goal for this release is to get feedback, we have set up a bug tracking system (don’t worry about the Firefox warning about “This Connection is Untrusted”, this is due to our self-signed certificate). You can register an account which will enable you to log in our Bugzilla ( is our central authentication solution). People can also send feedback on the mageia-discuss mailling list, even if we would prefer to use the bugtracker as this will make our work of tracking problems much easier. Please have a look before on Errata.

You can get the list of mirrors on the brand new mirror-managing web interface. The interface is also quite rough, so do not hesitate if you wish to help improving it.

While the release of the first iso is an important milestone, this is just one of the first steps of the long journey, that started some months ago, with the initial announcement of the project. We all hope to be able to prove with this iso that the project is indeed in a quite good shape, and hope you will join us on the Mageia boat toward your next Linux distribution! 🙂

After this alpha release, our next goal is to refine this product to a stable, pleasant release; that is due by the beginning of June, with several other intermediary (Alpha, Beta and RC) releases expected along the way:

  • Alpha 1 on February, 14th;
  • Alpha 2 on March, 15th;
  • Beta 1 on April, 5th;
  • Beta 2 on April, 26th;
  • Release Candidate on May, 17th;
  • Final release on June, 1st.

Enjoy first Mageia tests and see you for next release!

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80 Responses to Starting with Mageia: download it!

  1. castorinop says:

    Great!

  2. Pingback: Começando com Mageia! Download disponível! | Mageia Blog (Português)

  3. Pingback: Mageia first alpha relased! « KDE Piauí

  4. tigger-gg says:

    Thanks for your hard work!

  5. Andres says:

    Nice news !… Thanks for your work … Congratulations !

  6. 木如熙(来自中国GNU/Linux爱好者的问候) says:

    太好了,很高兴看到这个消息,这是我今天最愿意看到的新闻的。
    几个月的等待终于有了结果!加油!期待更多的惊喜!
    不过有点可惜呢,我们国内的镜像站点还没有更新alpha的iso!
    感谢Mageia开发者们!
    祝福你们!

    • Anon says:

      Translation:

      Great! Very glad to see this news, out of all the news I see today, this is one I most want to see. Months of waiting and now it’s here! Cheers! I will be waiting for even more surprises in the future!

      But it’s a pity. the chinese mirror sites don’t seem to have the latest alpha iso yet!

      Thanks to the Mageia developers!

      Bless you guys!

    • 罗子俊 says:

      是呀,恩,加油吧!

  7. madpuppy says:

    Good deal, Looking forward to your upward climb to the top of Distrowatch 🙂

    looking forward to see what you have in store for us dirty end users in the coming year.

    Thanks for all the hard work!

  8. Are there any screenshots available?

  9. Dan Joita says:

    magic happening

  10. Palin says:

    Great work. As a humble user, I welcome the June date! 🙂

  11. MichaelSOG says:

    Waiting for the mirror’s link

  12. PPK says:

    Great news. Congratulations to the team. Can u please clarify the following ..
    1. Will Mageia be a rolling release ? I would be willing to see a rolling release with Mandriva’s strength and Mageia’s freedom & innovation.
    2. Will Mageia contain restricted codecs by default ? If not, can I download them from other repos ?
    Regarding rolling releases .. let me tell you a fact. People are really vexed with having to install a new version every six months or so and doing all the tweaking/configuration again. On the other hand, they can’t lose those new and featureful softwares anyway. The only promising solution appears to be rolling releases like PCLinuxOS. Of course the updated ISOs can be made available periodically for the new installers.

  13. Pingback: Luthfi Emka » Mageia Linux: Rilis Mageia Linux Alpha 1

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  15. Pingback: The Magic is Back! « Colin.Guthr.ie

  16. João Paulo Marques Matos says:

    thank you!

  17. Pingback: Mageia Alpha 1 | thecamels.org

  18. Pingback: Comienza una nueva era: Mageia Alpha 1 ‘Cantine’ | MuyLinux

  19. Jean Nery says:

    Is it possible download the iso from an official torrent?

  20. sreejiraj says:

    hurray!!

  21. John Pisini says:

    Thanks I can’t wait to try it out. Thanks for all your hard work so far.

  22. Grmblmbl says:

    Great news, I’m going to try it soon !

    Thanks to the team, I hope Mageia will be a popular distro.

  23. Pingback: Mageia alpha 1. | ANDRE Ani et GNU/Linux

  24. Isadora says:

    Congratulations folks.
    I am downloading right now, and will test it the next days.

  25. Pingback: Mageia – alpha 1 : le fork de Mandriva en plein réveil ! | Le Weblog de Frederic Bezies

  26. Pingback: Mageia Alpha 1 “Cantine” disponible « Soft-Libre

  27. oupsemma says:

    Running the Mageia alpha 1 with Gnome installed.
    Congratulations for all the work done and thanks for this long awaited alpha.
    (No screenshot, as the Gnome desktop is pretty much like the usual green desktop you get on most Gnome distibutions).

  28. Luthfi Emka says:

    congratulations folks! i’m downloading right now…

  29. xerbi says:

    slow bit rate for Greek Downloaders… 90 KB/s from Germany and 20 KB/s from France. A torrent would help… Nothing in Piratebay! Come on peolpe give the magic to the masses! Greetings from Greece

  30. Pingback: The first Mageia alpha is available | pablo.barrera

  31. Sam Tuke says:

    Congratulations, can’t wait to use the final in June.

    Please keep Mageia’s software Free between now and then – make non-Free components optional with easy installers, but not included by default.

  32. Markus says:

    Nice to the release. However I’m not entirely familiar with Mageia:
    How are Mageia’s packages collected? Is this a rebranded Mandriva 2011? Are you planning to collect and support all packages yourself? Or are you aiming for an approach that’s similar to Ubuntu and Debian: Let the base OS be based on some other popular distro and add your flavour to it?

    • boklm says:

      It’s a real fork so we’re taking Mandriva packages for a start, but we will maintain them ourself and be independent of Mandriva.

      • Markus says:

        May I ask why you want a full fork and manage every single package yourself?
        I can only speak for myself but in all honesty: A full distro by a relatively small community of volunteers means far fewer packages than Debian, Fedora, or openSUSE which in turn means that Mageia will never be an option for me – no matter how polished your KDE software may be (I don’t use Pardus for the same reason).
        Again: It’s just me. Good luck building a community, though!

        • Michael says:

          The reason of the fork were explained in the initial announce ( kept on http://www.mageia.org/ ). But your question is “why do we do a fork instead of joining a bigger distribution” ?
          That’s simple, joining another project would not have fulfilled the goal of letting our work at Mandriva to survive and prosper, and would have let our community in the dark. Joining another community just mean that, dropping our 10 years of work, and letting users start again from scratch.

          • Markus says:

            I NEVER asked why not joining a bigger distribution. Please read my comment properly.
            Linux Mint never joined Ubuntu. Mint uses Ubuntu as base OS and is compatible to its packages. But Mint adds its own flavour by shipping its own installer, config tools, artwork, and (in the future) also a completely different shell.
            They don’t see the point of maintaining low-level packages like kernel, Xorg, glibc, etc. by themselves and neither do I.

            From the heritage I had assumed that Mageia would either be based on Fedora and adding the Drak tools etc. on top (like Mint) or a stabilized snapshot of the rolling-release PCLinuxOS (similar to what Ubuntu does with Debian).

            Personally, after my former experiences with really underground OSes as main desktop OS (BeOS, Syllable, QNX,…), I said to myself to stay in the relative mainstream (as mainstream as possible outside Windows) which means Debian/(K)Ubuntu/Mint, Fedora, openSUSE, or Mac OS X.

            But this is all FOSS and you can obviously do whatever you want. If you have somuch fun maintaining init-scripts, Xorg, kernel, perl, and whatever weird dependency you may encounter: Good luck.

            • boklm says:

              If you assumed that Mageia is just some artwork, a few config tools and an installer, then you were wrong. It’s a full Linux distribution. So we’re not using an other distribution as a base OS, we’re making our own distribution, like we used to do at Mandriva.

  33. fri says:

    Greatings. Happy days for community.

    When reading about Mageia compared to the seafaring boat, I imagined its logo slightly modified into form of cannon ball (but in reality it surely doesn’t require a lot of modifications). 😀

  34. Bas says:

    Congratulations with the real birth of the child called Mageia!

  35. TigerPaw says:

    Congratulations on the birth of Mageia! I’m about 100 MB short of finishing the 32-bit download even as I post this. And I don’t download Alpha software. For you, Mageia, an exception.

  36. Ben says:

    The installer reminds me of the old Mandrake installer (but brighter). It looks really slick.

  37. Chris says:

    Awesome, I’m installing the 64-bit alpha on VirtualBox OSE as I type this. I’ve been following this project since you guys started, it’s nice to see an alpha release so early. 🙂

  38. swap38 says:

    Very good new, thanks guys !

    PS : the little smiley at the bottom of this page is cool too 😉

  39. Pingback: Вышла первая альфа версия Mageia, форка Mandriva Linux | AllUNIX.ru – Всероссийский портал о UNIX-системах

  40. Pingback: Mageia Linux – Development Release: Mageia Alpha 1 | Pinoy Geeks Network

  41. madpuppy says:

    I have installed the 32bit Alpha In virtualbox an it installed flawlessly, I am very impressed with all the cosmetic changes that have been done to sanitize the Distro of Mandriva copyright. It is also nice to see KDE 4.6 running, everything looks really stable so far, I haven’t had any show stoppers whatsoever, no crashes, and no general weirdness that comes with running any thing from Alpha to the First RC. Really looking forward to the interesting changes and software that you will package with the Distro. and the new ways that you implement things.

    Very exciting indeed for Mageia and us Users!

  42. Pingback: Surten alhora la primera alpha de Mandriva 2011 i de Mageia | GNULinux.cat

  43. Pingback: Mageia Alpha 1 disponibile per il download | oneOpenSource

  44. païou says:

    Félicitations à toute l’équipe.
    Les iso sont là à la date prévue et même très tôt le matin.

    Cela fait quelques temps que je suivais l’évolution sur pkgsubmit.

    Sur distrib-coffee, le téléchargement est nettement plus rapide en utilisant rsync, plutôt que ftp.

    Dès demain, installation sur l’ordinateur de test.

    Il m’avait semblé avoir vu,il y a quelque temps, un paquetage task-xfce sur pkgsubmit. Je ne le retrouve plus. Erreur de ma part ?

    Tant pis, je testerai avec Lxde, dans un premier temps. En attendant de le trouver sur le miroir cauldron.

  45. Nick Djinn says:

    Hello. I have been a user of Linux Mint, though some things irk me about the direction of Ubuntu…I am a privacy advocate and dont care for the Google tracking and also dont care for how controlled and excessive moderation is on the Ubuntu forums. Also, Ubuntu has been having horrible problems with Pulse audio, and I was delighted when my Wacom tablet worked out of the box in Mandriva.

    What really got me interested in studying RPM distros is Meego. I am really enthusiastic about GNU linux on hand helds as opposed to Android. I think this is going to be big for Linux….I was hoping for a Debian-Apt-Get distro because it just feels faster and smoother to me, but it looks like its going RPM with Intel in charge.

    I can tell you right now, more people are moving towards the more liberal distros with codecs enabled rather than the stricter “free” distros. People want desktops that focus on the end user experience (Linux Mint), rather than being developer friendly or primarily server friendly. They want their MP3s and DVDs to work out of the box and they dont care about that philosophical stuff…..If they were really radical hackers they wouldnt let copyright infringement stop them anyway…..but most people are not hackers and they just want their PC to work out of the box.

    I think there is a chance that an RPM distro could attract large numbers of young people who gain interest in Linux thanks to handhelds running Linux……I think that compatibility with Meego, despite its current setbacks, is going to be important. Its ability to do everything out of the box will also be important if you want to reclaim the spirit of being user friendly and the perfect desktop OS…..young people probably wont want something in the spirit of Fedora….They want their MP3s. They probably will want an RPM based distro with some similarities to the Spirit of Linux Mint, but more stable than the Red Hat offshoots.

    This is just some ranting/suggestions….I would consider switching and promoting Mageia if it focused on out of the box end home user experience and has some compatibility tools with mobile linux.

    Im not a linux geek really, but not a noob anymore either. Id be willing to test it and tell you what is intuitive or not intuitive about this release from a non-geeks perspective.

  46. Pingback: Mandriva & Mageia Release Their Alphas « Raiden's Realm

  47. Dave Postles says:

    I’m using the LXDE desktop. I’ve installed LibreOffice 3.3.0 from the LibreOffice website. I’ve added vlc and a few other things from the core CD. I’ve changed the wallpaper. There is a small problem with the opacity on the panel, I believe.

  48. Dave Postles says:

    BTW, many congratulations – much enjoying this testing phase.
    For the repository: QGIS, please.

  49. Pingback: Mageia Inicia: ¡A descargarla! | Mageia Blog (Español)

  50. Clod says:

    Works flawlessly well on VMWare…the only weird thing was the “manual” network setup prompting “invalid ip” but overall, congrats to all of you guys on this alpha release!

    Waiting for June release….woooooottt!

    Some screenshot as well:
    http://blog.cdelfino.com

    Cheers.

  51. Dave Postles says:

    Are there any printer drivers and CUPS? I need to install HPLIP for my LaserJet 1010. Do I need to do this from the HPLIP website and if so, do I follow the installation instructions for Mandriva?

  52. Pingback: Download Mageia Alpha 1 | LinuxBox.Web.ID

  53. Chirag says:

    Downloaded Installed Loved it seems Created to be Used as Desktop version only. I will continue testing it and may continue Using it. Brave First Release.

  54. Pingback: Fedora & OpenSUSE Drop Unity? Nvidia 1440p CPU, PlayOn on Android! | This Week In Linux

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