After more than one year of development, the Mageia community is very proud to finally deliver this long-awaited release, Mageia 5. This release announcement is a big sigh of relief, an “At last!” that comes straight from the heart of the weary – tired as one can be after long days of hard but rewarding work.
And still, we chose to take our time to fix major issues and have a high quality release, without rushing it. Maybe our best release so far, taking into account the impressive work that was done on the installer, both to add new features and to get rid of old bugs.
If our “At last!” also echoes in you after months of waiting for this release, go grab it right now! While it downloads, feel free to read on and learn more about Mageia 5:
What’s new in Mageia 5
The main spotlight of Mageia 5 is the support of UEFI systems. If you are not familiar with the term, feel free to check our detailed article about it. In a few words, let’s say that most systems with recent hardware (3 years old or newer) are equipped with UEFI, so in order for our users to be able to install Mageia 5 easily on recent hardware, UEFI support was a must.
Implementing support for UEFI boot and the partitioning changes that are inherent to this new technology meant making lots of changes in our installer. It was done incrementally, fixing bugs as they showed up, and discovering new and old issues along the way. We were lucky to have a very dedicated team of QA testers for this release, and they fiddled with the installer to try to find its shortcomings on the most exotic settings. All in all, those tests spawned many fixes and new features in our installer on top of the new UEFI support: RAID support, GRUB 2 integration, changes to the partitioner…
Of course this new release is not only about the installer changes; all packages have been updated, and we did a lot of work to ensure that all packages built fine against the new toolchain in Mageia 5. Among others, you will find:
- Low-level: Kernel 3.19.8, X.org 1.16.4
- Toolkits: Qt 5.4.0, GTK+ 3.14.8
- Desktop environments: KDE 4.14.3, GNOME 3.14, Cinnamon 2.4.5, MATE 1.8.0, XFCE 4.12, LXQt 0.9.0, Plasma 5.1.2
- Applications: LibreOffice 4.4.2.2, Firefox ESR 31.7.0 (will soon be updated to Firefox ESR 38.x)
Feel free to browse Mageia App DB’s comparison page (applications only and all updated packages) to see the differences between Mageia 4 and Mageia 5. All in all, Mageia 5 contains almost 2,000 applications and 25,000 packages, all available from the official repositories.
Why choose Mageia
One word: community. Mageia is a top-notch Linux distribution entirely made by and for its community. No strings attached, no company behind it, only users who have a great time developing the distribution that they use daily, at home or at work. And as a Mageia user, you are part of this rewarding experience, and you can contribute in many different ways to make it yours.
Mageia is shaped for its users, and is therefore suitable in any environment: work, home, servers, leisure. Everything is supported directly by the community through the official repositories, out of the box. Mageia has always striven to offer a universal usage experience across a large set of desktop environments, integrated with some of the best control and administration tools available.
The Mageia 5 look
As always for the artwork, we called for contributions from the community and we received high quality proposals. We chose the starry night painted by Robert Gormly, but you’ll also find many additional wallpapers and screensavers that we selected from the community contributions.
A special thanks
This release would not have been possible without the support of our whole community, so this is a thank you from everyone to the sysadmins, the QA and security teams, the documentation team, the atelier team and the translators, the packagers, the bug triagers and the developers, and finally, everyone else for their feedback and support on forums, mailing lists, and IRC channels, as well as their bug reports and donations.
Have fun with Mageia 5!
Congratulations and thanks to the hard workers, to the Mageia community!!!!
Really stable and great distro, I’ve been runing for almost 1 month now since RC. Give it a try, you won’t be disappointed.
This great release is also a tribute to Mandriva in my eyes. Especialy in their golden days.
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Thanks for all the effort in getting this out!! I just installed it and I must say, that since I first began using Linux (Redhat 4 in the mid 90’s, then Mandrake, Mandriva), this was the easiest install ever… I still have some tweaking to do and some additional programs to install but I am up and running in basically the time it took to run the install program. No problems with wifi, audio, or video (2 monitors) install at all.
Thanks again and keep up the great work!!!
Thanks for the great work done!
Congratulations, and thanks for the persevirence and the hard work. My first donation of the series will come in a few minutes, for prersevering and producing a well done distribution. The second part will come when i installed it on my test computer, and the third part will arrive when i upgraded my main desktop, the one i am typing from. I am confident i will be able to make all three parts 🙂
yep, so i am going to make the tree part donation, My test computer, very snazzy install, with many bells and whistles wend without a hitch, all my settings remained and all the packages updates, and top that, my system was functional all the way. I did have to trigger the update using the command line instructions, but that is a bug in my patience, not in the software. My main desktop actually offered the upgrade automatically today in the afternoon, so i did the full gui automatic update with the option to download everything checked, and i was using the system all night while it was updating like a champ, it is 5:22 in the morning, and i am up and running Mageia 5 on my main desktop, the only hiccup was the network card got renamed from eth0 to ens4 , somehow couldn’t reconnect, but a quick visit to the network settings fixed it, and as you can see, i have network 🙂 even my rotating background images are working properly. so 2 more donation coming in the pipe, as i get my paycheck 😉 well done team Mageia. well done.
Congrats mga team… i have been soo waiting. despite the delay, we are here
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A small release news is added here
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Congratulations, and thank you for the hard work.
its definitly the best mageia release to date. well done to all who contributed,
been using it since beta1
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huráááááááááá 🙂
Congratulations!!
You rock! \o/
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Best release ever, install was seemless. All hardware detected and activated. Thank you all!
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Why not Plasma 5?
We provide Plasma 5, but in a relatively old version. We had to spot updating packages at a time to focus on making the distribution stable enough for the release, so Plasma 5 had to stay in version 5.1.
At this old version is really lacking, we did not put it forward too much, but we will provide an update to Plasma 5.3 in the coming weeks.
Mucho congrats to all! Job well done!
Very well, I’m a Mageia 4 user and I’m waiting for intstall the new version.
My donation to 1GYF2h69NrJ7Pp92bNPDEdLABbH1hR7rsA will arrive in the next months.
For my opinion, Mageia 5 is best release ever!
Thanks! Long Live!
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Yay for new release but no Plasma 5 makes me sad 🙁
Not a Mageia user, but keep up the good work!
It is packaged, just not used as the default. There are meta packages available to install it with called task-plasma5 or task-plasma5-minimal. It conflicts with standard KDE so will also remove many of the default packages when installed.
There is a major update for plasma5 planned shortly, when we’ve recovered some strength, so it may be best to wait for that to hit the mirrors before using it on your daily driver.
I appreciate what you guys are doing with a small team. Keep up the good work!
Best Mageia release yet. Seamless install on Laptop and Desktop.
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Performed a fresh install yesterday on a SSD as MGA4 was non-UEFI. Did a custom partioning for /home was on /dev/sdb1, picked KDE and added on-line repo’s and after that it was smooth sailing.
Only issue I have now is the akonadi_baloo_indexer and its helper programs. Memory and CPU usage looks ok to me but IO bandwidth is huge. It really makes my system feel sluggish. My PC has been running for over 24hrs now and akonadi_baloo_indexer is still very busy (/home is >1TB). I’ll wait a little bit longer but if things don’t improve I’ll kill this utility as I don’t really need it.
Is there an easy way to do it for I didn’t find a menu item for it.
Maybe I’ll run it in VirtualBox until the issues are fixed. I certainly don’t want to go back to using it as my primary OS.
Which issues?
These “issues” … have you raised bugs for them, or mentioned them to anyone? Because unless you do nobody will be in a position to read your mind.
A big, thank you. Install was 100% successful on my single core AMD Athlon 3200+ (2.2GHz), nForce 3 board, Geforce 6600GT (driver was installed by setup), WiFi by TP-LINK (TL-WN722N) was detected after first boot and runs OK. Just to point out this type of system must have manually setup multiplier by BIOS or will froze on boot when Linux is trying to setup CPU saving frequency options. Thanks again…
Looks like sleep mode doesn’t work on my system, well that’s all…
You should add KDE Plasma 5 and so on…
Thanks that boot screen is not scrambled eggs after after install of display driver like in other distros and you fix this on install level.
You should see a comment above from MrsB:
http://blog.mageia.org/en/2015/06/19/solid-and-strong-and-humming-along-heres-mageia-5/comment-page-1/#comment-7615
I had to interrupt my installing mageia 5. There were problems with grub 2 and the old bug with installing of czech language.
Fedora 22 came with KERNEL 4 and Gnome 16
Please do upgrade Mageia to both
You do know that the move in Kernel versioning to v4.x is purely symbolic?, It’s a point release. I’m sure Mageia will bump the kernel in the coming weeks, as they’ve done for all previous distro releases
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Excellent! And everything works on my CedarView laptop! Wow!
I have been happy with Mageia since version 3, and so with version 4.
Mageia 5 first time ever I installed from USB stick. Worked fine.
Now my problem is: my main Internet browser Opera is gone, without any advance notice, and so is Thunderbird email program. Unable to install it… 🙁
I’ve tried most of the famous distros and i can say that Mageia is the most stable, bug-free and easy to set up distro ever existed. The one i don’t like: just 1 year of life cycle. If you want to make a distro compared to the giants, you should support it for longer time.
Mageia releases are supported for 18 months. Apart from LTS releases, that’s actually longer than most other distros (Fedora and non-LTS Ubuntu releases are only supported 12 months AFAIK).
That’s good. Mageia has something which makes it different than every other distro – the control center. No other distro makes an afford to distinguish with something. Just Suse have control center but its so simple and ugly. Every other distro just distinguish with their different locations of config files, packet systems and some cosmetical things. Keep it up! 😉
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Great work guys. I have all that I need and it works. I have played with it a little and I’m impressed.
Mageia 5 is working so near perfect. This release certainly did not disappoint