Everyone at Mageia is exceptionally happy and proud to announce the availability of the release candidate of Mageia 6. It has been a long road, but we are at the last step and Mageia 6 is just around the corner.
The extra time that this release has taken has had one huge benefit: the number of new and exciting additions to Mageia is staggering. They include the now far more mature Plasma to replace KDE4, the DNF and COPR stacks to supplement urpmi, big updates to the major desktops and the other large stacks and components, and lots of package updates.
Since Mageia 6 sta 2, a lot of work has been done on the installer, especially regarding the support of proprietary drivers and VirtualBox support. More than 30 blocker bugs have been resolved over the 2½ months that the RC took to prepare. A big thank you to all the testers and developers involved in this process!
The QA team and the packagers spend a lot of time ironing out the upgrade process by reporting and fixing many package conflicts. Thanks to your feedback on those RC ISOs, we should hopefully be able to fix the last corner cases. Note: when upgrading with the classical installer ISOs, make sure to enable additional repositories to ensure that all your Mageia 5 packages can be upgraded.
We have also changed the ISO lineup. While the new Xfce ISOs were available with sta2, the positive feedback and their popularity has meant that we can confidently add them on a permanent basis. The available ISOs are as follows:
- 32-bit Classical Installer DVD
- 64-bit Classical Installer DVD
- GNOME 64-bit Live DVD
- Plasma 64-bit Live DVD
- Xfce 32-bit Live DVD
- Xfce 64-bit Live DVD
All of these ISOs can be used on USB sticks if required. If bootable CD media is needed, we offer the boot.iso that can use one of many different sources for retrieving packages, including a network mirror, a locally mirrored set of packages, or the Classical Installer DVD. Instructions for using the boot.iso are available here.
Package Versions
The release candidate, and very likely Mageia 6 by extension will ship with the following major packages:
- Linux Kernel 4.9.28 (current LTS)
- X.Org 1.19.3
- Plasma 5.8.6 (current LTS)
- Gnome 3.24.3
- MATE 1.18.2
- Cinnamon 3.2.8
- Xfce 4.12.1
- LibreOffice 5.3.3.2
- Firefox 52 ESR
- Thunderbird 52
- Chromium 57
The full list of all shipped software can be seen on the .idx file for its respective ISO.
If you would like to test out the release candidate, the ISOs can be downloaded from here. Alternatively, you can use BitTorrent, which is available here.
While we would greatly appreciate the wider testing and feedback and any issues that you report to the Mageia Bugzilla, please bear in mind that this is not the final release.
To that end, the release notes are available here and the errata here.
As you may have noticed, the Mageia forums (at least those hosted on mageia.org) are still unavailable (however, the French forum is still available), as their migration to Mageia 5 gives our sysadmins some headaches. If there is anything that you would like to discuss, we encourage you to use the mailing lists or IRC channels in the meantime. Of course, fixing the forums is still the highest priority for our sysadmins, so they should hopefully be restored soon.
Image credit: xkcd
Excellent! Sharing the 64-bit torrent now. 🙂
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There is a “6” directory in the mirrors, is this the RC?
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Shame it’s stuck on 4.9 kernel. Had to jump to another distro after going AMD cpu
What’s the CPU? Fairly sure there are people using this on ryzen already.
Just checked further, we have had working tests on an 1800 running on a Crosshair 6 Hero, 1800 on a Asus B350 and a 1700 on the MSI B350.
All the needed drivers were in kernel 4.9.5 and 4.9.10, with the audio drivers added 4.9.12-2 – so there should be no ryzen support issues with the kernel used in the RC, as all of these were pre sta2.
If you’re having a specific issue, either open a bug or post it to the dev list, that will get it the attention it needs from the appropriate people.
sta2 is what i tried at the time, IRQ trap was the issue due to 4.9 not supporting it. I know about support can be backported. That and the forums being down decided to jump.
I will give this RC a spin.
Sounds good, if it’s still the same file a bug, as not supporting what I assume will become a common cause isn’t ok.
Well it still don’t work ;(
Same problem as before, IRQ trap
Ah, that really sucks, can you file a bug about this as it seems like something that really needs to be fixed.
Great job guys, this afternoon i’ll download this version.
A quick question: why prefer dnf over zypper?
Hey,
The reason why we’ve been spending time on DNF over Zypper boiled to two big things:
1. DNF has a robust API and an ecosystem that proves that building automation and frontends around it is feasible. In fact, because of this particular point, we’ve even got a variant of rpmdrake powered by DNF called “dnfdragora”, which you can install by doing “dnf install dnfdragora-” (“qt” for Qt5-based UI, and “gtk” for GTK+3-based one). There’s also a large ecosystem of plugins and integrations around DNF. Zypper, by contrast, has very weak bindings to languages other than C++, and the only real graphical frontend is the YaST frontend. That makes it non-trivial to build things around it.
2. The upstream was more responsive and receptive to working with us to make DNF great for Mageia. The DNF team is very responsive and does a great job handling our feedback and taking care to make improvements as needed. In contrast, when I approached the Zypper folks, the response was lukewarm and no one was ever really around to help out with issues.
In addition to having DNF, we worked with the Fedora COPR developers to get Mageia properly supported as a distribution target in the COPR system. Today, it is possible to build Mageia packages alongside Fedora and CentOS/RHEL packages through the system. I’m also working to get Mageia supported on openSUSE’s OBS as well.
Thank you very much for the very exhaustive explanation. Also I’d like to ask why port dnf to mageia instead of porting the dnf features you like into urpm and why make copr work with mageia instead of create a brand new system only for mageia.
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I used Mandriva 2010 and after seven years nothing was changed (XFCE version here). A better software center for when? And a control center?
Well the version of XFCE that is in the RC is 4.12.4, which happens to be the latest stable release of the XFCE website.
As for the control centre, the underlying code may be very similar, but there have been multiple improvements in design, hardware support and fixing numerous features to work for the more modern underlying subsystems in current releases.
I don’t wanna be rude, but I believe in innovation, new tools, e.g. Elementary OS app store, but thank you Donald and all team for this release.
Well if that’s what you are after, I am fairly sure that both Gnome and Plasma have their respective app stores working as intended. I haven’t tested as I prefer all package handling to be cli based, for which urpmi covers everything and more.
We are actually working on a next-generation replacement of the control center. The project is “Manatools” and you can check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/manatools
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Just tested Mageia 6 RC. It worked a lot better when I didn’t use UEFI. Grub2 couldn’t find my Windows partition. Under non-UEFI, Grub2 found it.
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