Just one little rant from a new Mageia user – we get quite a few of these, so you could think of it as a representative sample:
My new Thinkpad came Friday morning: A T520, quad Core i7, 8GB RAM, 15.6 inch screen, built in WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, etc..
After burning 4 DVDs to create a boot and restore disks for the Win7 Pro and
other software that came pre-installed, I shrank the main Windows partition down,
leaving a couple hundred GB of free space for a Linux install.
I decided it was finally time to give Mageia 1 a try. I burnt a DVD from the x64
iso and proceeded to install. I chose Gnome over KDE, this time, because of the
modestly smaller footprint. (I’m comfortable with both)
With no CLI tweaking at all, I got everything to work… and I mean everything.
Sound and video worked immediately. WiFi worked once I was online and the system
could fetch the correct driver. (No NDISwrapper wanted nor needed here)
All of the special buttons work. The WiFi toggle button, the volume buttons, mute
button, sleep mode button. I fired up Firefox and browsed using WiFi to my music
server. Selecting an album to play, I found that the buttons to pause, skip
tracks forwards and backwards, and stop, all worked correctly with the default
movie player.
Making the Bluetooth mouse work required merely using Gnome’s Bluetooth config
tool and pairing the devices. Poof! The mouse was working too. No hand editing of
Xorg.conf!
CPU speed-stepping works. Sleep mode kicks in if I either close the lid or press
the sleep button, and comes back up correctly later. Pressing the lock button
locks the screen, causing the usual login prompt to appear. Scrolling works in
both axis if I slide my finger along the edge of the track pad.
I’ve done a lot of Linux installs, but I’ve never seen this much hardware work
right-out-of-the-box on any machine, let alone a laptop. The Win7 side couldn’t
see the Bluetooth mouse without the driver CD, but Mageia 1 had it covered. Amazing.
Tis truly a sweet machine with a very sweet Linux install.
Long Live Urpmi!
Congratulation! 🙂
this is 99% true 🙂
except for some network manager problems that sometimes make that plug and play feeling a bit less plug and play…
it seems that you guys are all very much busy nowadays, so that some bugs lay around a bit longer.
all in all i am really happy that we have mageia! i tried out a few other distributions, none of them is working so flawlessly and so nicely with KDE!
great having such a dedicated community, that i’m more than happy closing an eye or two over some little problems.
once again:
THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!
Truly hard to find familiar individuals on that issue, you sound like you understand exactly what you are posting about! Bless you
Pingback: Hallow Demon Friendz | Blog | A Mageia Rant
Pingback: Links 6/9/2011: Android 3.2 Previews, wdiff 1.0.0 Released | Techrights
Yes,
this is true. I’ve done a review of Mageia 1 (KDE) installed on my old laptop (an asus A6VA).
And all, except the webcam and the sound from headphones, works immediately.
The Webcam never works with any Linux distro and never will work. For the headphones, just create a file and put in a line of a code.
Ok! My laptop is very old but the performance is excellent. If you compare Mageia with OpenSUSE (both the latest), Mageia is very faster.
Gianluca.
If you are interested of my review (in Italian), you can find it .
I expected a “rant” to be negative. If I have anything negative to say about Mageia, it’s that they seem to be not open to new ideas at all in their forum. Seems they just want to go down the same path as Mandriva as they were before the financial difficulties really took the air out of the sinking ship. Mageia has a chance to do it differently, but any suggestion of some other path they could take is just shot down immediately. It’s a shame. They could be more successful if they just implement a few new ideas to set themselves apart.
Why a rant should be always negative? 🙂 Anyway I don’t think Mageia team is so closed as you say. The only point we are looking for is a way to build solid ground for distribution. This means infrastructures but also teams. We cannot launch lots of new features if we do not have man power enough. People would not trust Mageia if we are just enable to achieve it.
I don’t think it is quite a s simple as that. First of all, the Mageia programmers first had to sort out a couple of issues that did not work and stable in the other versions of Mandriva at that IMHO, is first priority now. Mandriva was very up and down but the strong points did pull it through. The last solid linux system I had was 2008.1 Spring. So get the system to run stable and then throw in the new ideas. Personally I rather prefer something that is working rock solid and predictable, than having all the latest cutting edge items that is nothing more than fashion. So I say check out the fashion first and then keep it when it is proven to work.
My experience is quite similar. I had found that the previous distribution I was using(you know it, I am sure) was starting to develop…inconsistancies…with each update. I don’t know about you, but I find that when things work, I am happier and my sheets are whiter and brighter.
I had downloaded Mageia, but not installed it. Now, I had used the other one since v7 or so, so this was a great leap of faith. Not that great, but…well…you grow attached.
So, summoning up an infantesimal amount of courage(Not too much. After all, I had trusted these guys before, amirite?) I installed it. Running two monitors, and finding nvidia-settings to be its usual crapshoot, I made one edit of xorg.conf(“RightOf”).
Bingo. Everything. Just. Works. I be rocking.
Thanks guys. I still trust you. Can I buy you all a Stella? 😉
Pingback: Um discursso da Mageia | Mageia Blog (Português)
So I’ve been excited about Mageia ever since I heard about it. Mandriva holds a special place in my heart, being the first distro I used in any kind of length, but It’s quality over the years has seemed to be slipping. But what could be better than a distro forked by people that love Mandriva just as much as me? Not a whole lot by the looks of it. I finally downloaded it and decided to try it on my little bros computer from about 2003. 2 Ghz P4, 512 MB ram. Thing struggles while trying to run XP SP3. Pop the Mageia 1 live cd in, wait a minute or two for boot, an WHABAMM, pretty, speedy, and stable gnome desktop (I’m a gnome kinda guy). Played with it for a bit, everything but the ever troublesome ATI drivers works out of the box. Faster than XP, and this is running off a CD. For distros first release, my mind is thoroughly blown. I’m gonna try the KDE flavor on my machine as soon as I get the chance. I’ve been looking for something to end my distro-hopping, and I think I may have found it 😀
I was introduced to Linux almost 9 years ago by Mandrake 9 and ever since the evolutions of Mandrake stayed my desktop of choice.
I now installed Mageia 1 and although I had to hammer and chisel a bit to get everything working nicely, I am overall very happy with the Distro. With that, the Mageia oaks have put in a sterling effort to help solve some of my issues and that alone convinced me that for this Distro, I will happily make financial donations in future.
If Mageia can improve in the way they delivered Mageia 1, I cannot else but see that it will soon be ranking with the top contenders.
I have used Man* from the very beginnings, when the name was Mandrake. In the last time I use Linux distributions running on a virtual machine (vmware) on a Mac box. I installed the prerelease versions of Mageia without any problems: the version 1.0 runs also quite well … Hope to see 2.0 quite soon!!
Pingback: Compte rendu d’installation Mageia | Mageia Blog (Français)
Friends ,Iam a bit confused about Mageia project ,still I cheked the RC on my laptop,and gave it up.(I was with Mandiva ever since Mandrake9.1)
So when Mandriva 2011 released I installed it.To my disappointment it is not as Mandriva instead like something else.So I discarded it.Tried OpenSuse11.4.Not satisfied.Tried Fedora15 ,not satisfied .So once again with hesitation tried Mageia.1live CD.
I am satisfied .Now my prime OS is Mageia.1(I use Windows7 for some programme that do not work with wine anyhow)
Thanks alot ,Team Mageia
1. A rant is negative.
2. I wish my experience were that positive. I had problems with my webcam and multimedia player (nothing a quick edit to /etc/group didn’t fix, but it wasn’t just working out-of-the-box). But the biggest problem was getting my printer to work. What I PITA that was! It took days before I actually was able to get it to actually print something: I had to do a lot of googling, messing with config files, etc. It was a mess. I was considering just installing CUPS 1.3.x from my old Mandriva DVD, where all you had to do was supply the PPD file and it automagically worked, but I stuck with it and ultimately got it to work, but I have to say that it seems like Apple really messed it up this time.