Pulling Mageia 4.1 out of the hat

While most of the world is turned towards Brazil to enjoy the World Cup, Mageia has been preparing its own major worldwide event: Mageia 4.1 has been released!

If you were not expecting it, you might wonder what this unnanounced 4.1 version is. It is a maintenance release for Mageia 4 which contains all security and bugfix updates that were issued since the release in February 2014. In particular, the Mageia 4 ISO images were affected by an upstream syslinux bug which prevented installation using a burned DVD on some older hardware. Among the updated packages you will find the Linux kernel (version 3.12.21), various drivers for your hardware, and updated software such as Libreoffice and Firefox. Another notable update is the fix for the well-known “Heartbleed” bug of OpenSSL.

Please note that the Mageia 4.1 version tag concerns only the respin of the ISO images: the actual release that gets installed is still Mageia 4, with all ofthe updates that had been released by early June. This means that if you are already running Mageia 4 and performing updates regularly, you are not required to do anything since your system is already up-to-date. The Mageia 4.1 maintenance release is meant for new installations and upgrades from Mageia 3.

The download links on the website have been updated, so if you were waiting for the dust of the release to settle before upgrading to Mageia 4, now is the right time!

This maintenance release could only happen thanks to the dedicated work of the QA team. They had to test these new ISO images on various hardware while also testing and validating the regular updates for Mageia 3 and 4. This was a daunting task, even more so since the QA team is understaffed.

As you know, Mageia is 100% made by its community, and that means that you are also part of those who can make Mageia. So don’t hesitate to get in touch with the QA team if you would like to help and give us a hand. There are tasks for everyone in the QA team, from testing bugfixes and security updates to the upcoming Mageia 5 Alpha1 ISO images! If QA is not to your taste, then try one of the other teams instead.

Speaking of which, the other Mageia contributors have not been idle while the QA team was preparing this new set of ISO images: Mageia 5 is already in the making, with the first alpha arriving in July! We haven’t communicated much about it until now, but you will soon get all of the information you have been craving.