Weekly roundup – 2017, week 11

It has been another busy week with lots of changes, upgrades, tests and news.

Cauldron

All of the Mageia-developed tools have been updated to include the latest translations, as well as updates to the DrakX installer that will hopefully fix some of the remaining bugs, more on that later. libinput was updated to 1.7 RC2, so if there are any regressions with input devices following this, please submit bugs to the bugzilla, so that we can help upstream fix them in time for Mageia 6. The kernel was updated to 4.9.15 final yesterday, with the required rebuilds following, so that update should be available soon, if not already. KDE applications 16.12.3 and MATE 1.18 also landed. The FFmpeg update and required rebuilds were finalised, so hopefully, all the issues have been straightened out there, v4l-utils 1.12.3 also landed. Builds for an update VLC 3.0-git snapshot are also ongoing. There were also updates to Calibre 2.81 and LibreOffice 5.3.1.rc2. As this was written, there was extensive activity on the build system, so plenty of updates should be coming.

Sta2 testing feedback roundup:

While the majority of the feedback has been positive, to the extent that we are moving forwards towards a release candidate build, there are still ongoing issues with NVIDIA proprietary drivers, specifically the 340 driver for slightly older cards. Testing for fixes is ongoing, a new round of internal ISOs was generated to test this and to check the status on installer bugs, such as some buttons appearing off screen at the partitioning stage in some languages. The next round of ISO testing will be in preparation for the RC release.

Mageia 5

Kernel updates to 4.4.54 are in testing, so expect these soon once the updates have been validated.

Security updates to MariaDB, Pidgin, libquicktime and others are currently going through validation, as well as a few others that will be available soon.

Community

Maintainer groups for the main programming languages are in the process of being setup, to nominally share the work load of the huge perl or python stacks on groups of packagers. Similar groups for other large stacks or components proved successful for the kernel, the Mageia tools and some desktop environments so this will allow for similar work sharing on the language stacks.

Successful event at the Chemnitz Linux Day, Mageia had a booth there showing our system with contributors on hand to answer questions, full write up coming soon, but in the meantime, some pictures are up on the German Forum.