8 in beta2

Posted on December 13, 2020 by papoteur

We are happy to announce the release of Mageia 8 Beta 2. After a  long time since the beta 1, we look forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts so that we can continue to get Mageia 8 ready for release.As we said in a previous post, a lot of work had to be done for the basesystem upgrade, java, kernel, and the graphical stack. These upgrades are now in a state that allows for the Beta 2 ISO’s to be built and tested.

Here are some of the major packages included in this release:

  • Kernel – 5.9.12 (5.10 will land in a short term)
  • glibc – 2.32
  • gcc – 10.2.1
  • rpm – 4.16.1
  • Chromium – 87 (x86_64-only)
  • Firefox – 78.5 (ESR) 
  • LibreOffice – 7.0.4
  • Plasma – 5.20.4
  • GNOME 3.38.1
  • Cinnamon 4.8.2
  • Xfce 4.15.2
  • Mate 1.24

PHP is provided in release 8.0. As this one is very recent, some applications using it are not yet ready for it.

A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the classical installation media or the .lst file for the live iso images.

For those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded here, as always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.

The set of available ISO images is the same as in Mageia 7, offering installation media for both 32 and 64 bit systems, 64bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32bit live image for Xfce. Some of the major improvements in ISO are that our netinstall can now be used to install over WIFI connections with WPA encryption. Previously, only WEP encryption was available. You can find more information in the Release Notes which are still updated.

We hope that the release works well for you, but if there are issues please report them to our Bugzilla so that we can get around to sorting them for release. If you want to get involved in ISO testing, packaging or any other aspect of Mageia, there is lots of information here.

A huge hand to all of the people involved with getting this release out of the door, and to all of the testers for giving us the feedback that we need to get Mageia 8 ready.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 30 Comments

Mageia 8 is on its way

Posted on November 13, 2020 by papoteur

The road to get Mageia 8 is winding, slow but steady.

The current situation is that major packages have been updated to latest versions, such as:

– latest Linux kernel 5.9.6 built for x86_64, i586, arm7l and aarch64  architectures,which can recognize all new released hardware since Mageia 7.1. We intend to release Mageia 8 with a Long Term Support Kernel. 5.10 will be the new LTS one, just around the corner for a December release. We will ship with this version.

– basesystem with systemd 246, glibc 2.31, GCC 10.2, LLVM 10.0.1, urpmi 8.123, DNF 4.2.23 and rpm 4.16.0 ;

– Java stack updated to java-11-openjdk (11.0.9.6) and built against this version;- python 3.8.5, rust 1.47, ruby 2.7.2, Golang 1.15.3,…

We decided to stop  supporting Java 8, and only have Java 11. This requires fixing the Java stack, as some applications  have never been ported, and therefore have to be removed, while others have to be updated to the ported version.

On the desktop side, we have an updated x11-server to 1.20.9 stack. A Wayland session for GNOME is available on Intel, AMD and even NVIDIA (with nvidia-current nonfree drivers). KDE Plasma is based on QT 5.15.1 with Plasma-Workspace 5.20.2, which can permit a wayland session preview. All infrastructure is here for it to have a desktop running on modern technologies. By default, we still ship Plasma with an X11 session on all hardware.

GNOME is at 3.38.1. LXqt is 0.16. XFCE is at 4.15 preview and is a good candidate to move to the 4.16 release before we ship Mageia 8.

All other desktop environments are updated and run well (Cinnamon 4.6, MATE 1.24.1).

Firefox and Thunderbird are at same version as in Mageia 7 (78 ESR branch).

Developers are working on hopefully getting the Chromium browser to build.

Preventing us from releasing Mageia 8, the remaining issues are:

1) Some packages can’t build. There are 300 of them (among more than 14,500 in Core). Packagers and developers are working diligently to get these packages fixed.
2) We must provide a secure Mageia 8 operating system. Currently, there are over 70 security related bugs, and ones that can be fixed must be fixed before release.
3) NVIDIA drivers with 5.9 series Linux kernel make it difficult to have a good working set-up for all use cases. Currently, X11 drivers (OpenGL) are OK for the 455 and 390 series, but OpenCL and CUDA are broken due to change in the 5.9 Linux Kernel. We don’t have an ETA on fixing this yet so, nvidia-340 can’t run well with this 5.9.x kernel.
4) Dependency issues in packages which would prevent them from being installed.  Packagers are working to get these issues fixed as well.
5) Other various release blocker bugs also need to be ironed out.
A new Beta 2 ISO will be pushed as soon as these issues are resolved.

These difficulties are challenging, so we will release as soon it is ready.
See you soon!

Mageia Team

Writen by Aurélien

Posted in Beta, Uncategorized, Weekly roundup | 25 Comments

We are very sad to announce that José Jorge, who used the login zezinho, passed away on September the 11th

Posted on September 14, 2020 by papoteur

José was 46 years old, father to 3 children. He, and his 16 year old son, who was accompanying him on a bicycle ride, died September the 11th after being struck by a car.

José was a major contributor to the world of Free Software, in particular Mageia, his favorite distribution, which he had adopted after Mandrake/Mandriva and in which he had been actively participating for some 20 years. Among his many contributions were the inclusion of hundreds of packages such as Audacity, Chromium, fuse2, gcompris, other very important packages such as various WiFi drivers, as well as many games (bzflag, alienarena, crack-attack, flightgear). He was a tester
for Mageia Cauldron and a mentor for new packagers.

He was also a well known member of the Francophone LinuxFr.org website where his kind helpfulness was characteristic of him.

José Jorge was the founder of the LUG of Gers (France) named “Les GNUsquetaires”.

Condolences from all of the members of Mageia Linux go to his loved ones under the painful circumstances.

Posted in community, Uncategorized | 11 Comments

News from our package manager “urpmi”

Posted on August 28, 2020 by neoclust

News from our package manager “urpmi” :
Inherited from the Mandriva distribution, Mageia’s default package manager is URPMI. It offers a wide range of features to manage software repositories, install, update and remove applications packaged in rpm format. This standardized format is adopted by many well-known distributions, such as Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Suse and OpenSUSE.
Urpmi is also used to update your distribution.
This tool comes with many tools :
– urpmi, urpme to install and remove applications,
– urpmq to search for an application by querying repositories    
– urpmf to search for a package from the files it contains    
– urpmi.update to update your system and applications    
– urpmi.addmedia and urpmi.removemedia to add, remove your software repositories.

It is also the core application of :
– rpmdrake, the GUI to install/uninstall packages
– drakx, the Mageia installer from a DVD or the network
For more information, see mageia’s wiki page.

The arrival of “dnf” in the distribution in recent years should also be noted. However, urpmi remains a major and founding tool for Mageia,appreciated by its users for its ease of use and efficiency. That’s why this package manager is maintained, continues to be stabilized and improved as new versions are released. Moreover, it is compatible with rpm from versions 4.9 to 4.16 as well as with perl from versions 5.8 to 5.32 and benefits from their latest evolutions. See here and here.
URPMI and URPM documentation has been improved as can be seen here and here.  It’s also well documented and translated in our documentation.

What’s next?
The future is bright for URPMI. Indeed its development is not at a stand still and should take new directions.
It is planned to use the dependency manager libdnf/libsolv which bringsa finer management of those, especially with the so-called “weak”dependencies (to do this we are waiting for a stabilization of their programming interfaces).
In order for urpmi to be perfect, we need feedback from what doesn’t work. To do this, they must be uploaded in our bug tracker.

Posted in community, Mageia, QA, release, Updates | 3 Comments

More Progress for Mageia 8 – Beta 1 is available for testing

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Donald Stewart

We are happy to announce the release of Mageia 8 Beta 1. After the good feedback from Alpha 1, there have been some improvements and fixes for this release, we look forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts so that we can continue to get Mageia 8 ready for release.

Here are some of the major packages included in this release:    

  • Kernel – 5.7.9
  • glibc – 2.31
  • gcc – 10.1.1
  • rpm – 4.16.0
  • Chromium – 81
  • Firefox – 78
  • LibreOffice – 6.4.5
  • Plasma – 5.19.3
  • GNOME 3.36
  • Xfce 4.15.2

A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the installation media.

For those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded here, as always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.

Image credit xkcd

The available ISO images are the same as in Mageia 7, offering installation media for both 32 and 64 bit systems, 64bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32bit live image for Xfce.

Some of the major improvements include improved ARM support, all packages have now been built for AArch64 and ARM v7, completing the transition away from Python 2 and very recent hardware support. There have been many improvements in the installer, which now has better support for F2FS and Nilfs2. Both the live and classical environments have been improved with the use of ZStd compression, this will give faster boot and installation times. There has also been considerable work with package management, rpm 4.16 has brought many improvements including automatic SSD detection and improved transaction speed, meta data parsing within urpmi has been accelerated through the use of ZStd compression, AppStream metadata use has been improved to allow better integration with GNOME and Plasma. A full list of features can improvements can be seen here.

We hope that the release works well for you, but if there are issues please report them to our Bugzilla so that we can get around to sorting them for release. If you want to get involved in ISO testing, packaging or any other aspect of Mageia, there is lots of information here.

A huge hand to all of the people involved with getting this release out of the door, and to all of the testers for giving us the feedback that we need to get Mageia 8 ready.

Posted in community, Mageia, packager, release | 24 Comments