Mageia was at The Paris Open Source Summit 2016

The 2016 POSS (Paris Open Source Summit, on Nov 16 & 17) was a great event for Mageia and its 3 representatives who ran the booth: DtuxMagnux77 and Lebarhon.

This year, there were no lonely users coming with laptops to show us 3D display issues or that their sound wasn’t working, it is a testament to how good a release Mageia 5 is. Instead, we met many people using Mageia for development, teaching or for their professional living. It was nice to see how well known Mageia is as a serious and reliable platform. We met the leader of Alcasar, a network access controller used by many French administrations. Alcasar is running on thousands of computers, all of them under Mageia. These people often ask good questions, here are two examples, the first one from a developer and the second one from a teacher:

– On a computer without a graphic interface, after an automatic update, how to know if a reboot is necessary? or at least, which packages need it?

– Mageia says Live releases are for testing. For their first Mageia usage, many people prefer to use an old unused computer, the kind of computer with poor resources. Unfortunately, the Lives ISOs are shipped with KDE or GNOME, the desktop environments needing the most resources! Don’t you think Live releases should be shipped with LXQt or Xfce?

From most of the visitors, the same question was always coming again and again. In case it wasn’t on your mind…. “When is planned the Mageia 6 release?” In one hand, it is great to know that Mageia 6 is so much expected, but on the other hand, that means our communication is not good enough (This is something that we will try to work on).

photo-poss2016

POSS, just like any other exhibition is also a good way (if not the only one?) for any Mageia contributor or user to meet and see all the contributors they have already met in forums or mailing lists. This year we had the pleasure to discuss Mageia and Linux in general with ennael, baud, rtp, papoteur and piratu.

Cheers Dtux, Magnux77 and Lebarhon.

In answer to the questions asked, Mageia 6 will be released when ready, the next milestone release should be coming soon.

The inclusion of a “light” Live ISO is something that has been discussed a few times, while there is nothing stopping this from happening, the additional testing required to test 3 different live environments has always proved critical. If any volunteers would be willing to help with ISO building and testing, then this is something that could be addressed in the future.

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13 Responses to Mageia was at The Paris Open Source Summit 2016

  1. aguador says:

    Congrats on the POSS showing!

    I understand the quandary for users who want to test on older equipment as well as the additional testing needed. Of course more experiences users can use a net install for such a set up. Nonetheless there are great options for a light version if testers step forward.

    First, I see articles from time to time that claim that KDE can be made quite light in terms of ram usage. Perhaps a “slimmed down” plasma desktop could be offered. (OK, I have briefly run Mageia 4 KDE on a 32-bit netbook with 2 GB of ram with surprisingly good results, but lighter on those machines is clearly better.)

    Second, LXQt would be a logical choice for KDE users as it has a bit of the look and feel from the standpoint of settings.

    However, for a different flavour, XFCE and MATE seem logical choices. The first is simply rock solid and, as a consequence, a good choice. The worst that can be said about it is that a vanilla XFCE can be rather boring, even though Voyager (most notably) has shown just how far XFCE can be modified. MATE, my first Linux DE, is another logical choice, especially given how far it has come since its beginnings. It is also further along than XFCE in adopting GTK3.

    The above are just some thoughts on DE candidates given that I have no horses in the race being at once a reformed KDE user and a confirmed Enlightenment user.

  2. lebarhon says:

    The idea wasn’t to have more Live environments but to replace the existing ones by lighter ones.

  3. dave090 says:

    So… when mageia 6 will be released?
    When you say “that means our communication is not good enough (This is something that we will try to work on)” you have to know that in the meantime there is almost zero communication between the mageia developers and the mageia users. At least this is what i feel right now…
    Take this as an advice but you have to improve very much on this aspect…
    Godspeed

  4. Doug Laidlaw says:

    I can second the comment about keeping people informed. I was a lawyer, and one of the comments heard often is “He may be handling my case, but he never tells me what is going on.” Advice was, to set a realistic timeframe, and stick to it, or explain why you haven’t, and give a new target date. Don’t leave the client wondering. Mageia used to be like that.

    • aguador says:

      Yes, as someone who has been self-employed for longer than he cares to admit, the most frequent complaint we hear is about the lack of communication. We have also seen a bit of ire from users in prior posts.

      Your comment also makes me think about some possibilities. Over the last year or two we have seen comments about not only problems in getting DEs to play nicely, but lack of testers with EFI machines, and ISO server problems. With a little thought these issues can likely be used in raising funds and perhaps recruiting more people to contribute. The trick will be in not appearing to be weak or failing, but simply building and improving to produce the best for those that seek it.

      Returning to the communications issue, I imagine that it is not an easy one given the dispersed nature of the packagers and so on. However, something more concrete than “soon” would be helpful. This, unfortunately, requires that already overtaxed packagers and maintainers be called upon to summarize the status of things so that it can be communicated. However, an advantage here is that if critical bugs or other issues to be resolved are highlighted in the blog, it can serve to attract resources to address the problem.

      In short, yes, more communication and with more detail to let people know not only that work is progressing, but what the specific problems being ironed out are.

      • schultz says:

        You are more than welcome to bring these ideas for fundraising and improved testing to the relevant mailing lists, they are far more likely to get the attention that they deserve there.

        Well, to try and give something more than soon, the 5.1 release will be this week, after that the ISO builders and testers will be free for getting a milestone release of MGA6 ready. There will be a release blog to go with 5.1 and of course, when the next milestone for 6 is released, a bigger status update will be there too as we’ll know more of where the images sit after testing.

  5. schultz says:

    As was discussed here – http://blog.mageia.org/en/2016/11/24/mageia-5-support-extension-and-general-update/ we can’t give an exact date for Mageia 6, but Cauldron is in a good state and with the ISO builders will be free to work on Mageia 6 the next milestone release wont be far away now.

    • Why don’t to make a blog post with this info? I think the lack of info in blog.mageia.org is due to the lack of a specific public relation guy.

      It can be add the problems, the blockers bugs, their number and many info that I have read in the mailing list but that are not posted in this blog.

      By the way the release six will be published when ready, with or without the complains of the user in this blog or outside. Stay calm the six release will be arrive 🙂

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  7. Linuxien Francais says:

    Ca c’est un comble. Un billet de blog concernant un evenement qui se déroule en France, est publié sur le blog anglais, alors qu’il ne l’est tout simplement pas en francais.

    Que ce billet soit publié en anglais, pourquoi pas, à condition bien sur qu’il le soit tout d’abord en francais. Mais la je dis non, non et non.

    Moi qui pensait naivement que Mageia Linux était un OS bien francais. He bien non. Comme le prouve encore une fois ce billet, c’est l’anglais qui prime, toujours et toujours l’anglais. Tout cela pour des raisons “marketing”, car parait il, cela fait plus “pro” d’écrire en anglais. Quid alors de ceux qui ne parlent que le francais, nombreux en France, et c’est bien normal.

  8. katnatek says:

    About the first question (On a computer without a graphic interface, after an automatic update, how to know if a reboot is necessary?), you don’t say if you give a solution.

    I think it depends if you are or not present when you make an update, as i remember when the update ends an advice “Your may need reboot for ”

    So you can redirect all the output of urpmi –auto-update –auto to a text file and search for the reboot word.

  9. Hoyt Duff says:

    I’ve considered the Live releases to be used for “testing” in the sense of “try before you buy”, not “re-purpose your old, slow hardware”. There’s a US company XTRA-PC that is doing the latter with a version of Ubuntu dressed up to look like MS Windows. No reason Mageia can’t field a superior product.

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