Weekly Roundup 2018 – Week 1

In the spirit of a new year, Mageians have been very busy.

Meltdown and Spectre mitigation

meltdown and spectre logos

If you’ve been anywhere near a news channel in the last few days, you’ll have heard of these two CPU flaws – there’s an overview at arstechnica for those who haven’t seen it yet. It’s important to note that not only Intel CPUs are vulnerable!

Mageia kernel updates to mitigate these two flaws are already being worked on. Mageia 6 kernel updates released in the last 24 hours don’t as yet solve all the problems, but kernel-4.14.12-2.mga6 is in updates/testing (as is the .mga7 kernel for Cauldron). Expect updates very shortly. Our thanks to our tireless kernel devs and our ever busy QA team!

Mageia 5 is at end of life, people – to avoid issues with Meltdown and Spectre, it’s time to update to Mageia 6. Before you begin, please read “Upgrading from Mageia 5” and the associated links. That said, we have decided to apply specific updates to the kernel and to Firefox, just to deal with the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. Subsequent updates of the kernel to minimise the performance impact of the security updates will not be applied in Mageia 5, similar for other security fixes. So you have a little time to prepare to upgrade, but do get on it!

While all that has been going on, there has been a constant stream of updates into Cauldron, updates for Mageia 6 and the last few for Mageia 5, and plenty of packages going into testing. Check out the usual suspects: Mageia Advisories, the Mageia AppDBPkgSubmit to see the last 48 hours, and Bugzilla.

Have a great week!

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11 Responses to Weekly Roundup 2018 – Week 1

  1. Patricia Fraser says:

    More here from Greg Kroah-Hartman’s blog, on the kernel things: http://kroah.com/log/blog/2018/01/06/meltdown-status/

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  7. Nabodeníčko says:

    I’m still using Mageiu 5 because Mageia 6 contains GRUB2 and that’s a big disaster. When I get MGA6.1 I will upgrade. I’m sorry.

    • Filip says:

      There’s a reason that Grub2 or Grub-UEFI are the default bootloaders in Mageia 6. Grub Legacy is unmaintained for many many years. But you can still use it in Mageia 6. And other bootloaders as well.

      • Nabodeníčko says:

        Unfortunately, GRUB2 is the only choice when installing and later on replacing GRUBlegacy, and deleting GRUB2 will cause an unwarranted prolongation of system fire.

  8. cipha says:

    Mageia 6 is the biggest bs you ever made.

    It’s nowhere near ready for release, not stable and not working.

    In the meantime I lost my second system due to serious flaws in upgrading Mageia 5 to Mageia 6.

    – update via DVD not possible, installer breaks and can’t install/upgrade certain libs
    – update via urpmi in runlevel 3(!) works but: after reboot icewm is default wm
    – no sddm display manager installed by default, you have to install it afterwards manually(!)
    – your drakx11 is messing everything up in case of Nvidia: after configuring the video card, no entries in keyboard, mouse, monitor refresh rates. After reboot and login via sddm: black screen, only mouse cursor
    – X display is not set, not able to do “export DISPLAY=:0.0 ; startx”: .serverauth.xxx does not exist, cannot establish any listening sockets – (EE) please consult Mageia support at bugs.mageia.org”. I did, months(!) ago, no resolution, filed already a bug report, no one cares
    – lost two systems in 6 months
    – the flaws are the same on i586 and x86_64 systems, my conclusion: it’s not working, never did

    I’m gone. You suck. R.I.P. Mageia and good luck!

  9. xboxboy says:

    Mageia is a true community distro. I love that it’s free of the corporate guidance that’s starting to derail some the bigger distros.

    I’d be interested to know if ‘cipha’ is part of the community. Did they notify of any bugs in bugzilla? Were they a tester? Mageia 6 had a very long testing phase, did they download any of the testing ISO’s???

    I updated 2 installs with barely any issues, jusst had to re-enable and setup my samba server, but otherwise it was straight forward.

    That said, there was a huge change in the underlying software and components in Mageia 6, making upgrading challenging at best. We are hardly the only distro who had growing pains over the last 3 or 4 years.