As the upgrade path from Mageia 5 to Mageia 6 is harder than anticipated, many users are still on Mageia 5 today. We have therefore decided to prolong the support of Mageia 5 until December 31st, 2017 (instead of October 31st, 2017 as announced until now).
“Best effort” support limited to critical security fixes
This extended support will be limited to critical security fixes for components found in most systems, such as the kernel, glibc, firefox, flash-player-plugin, etc. The exact scope will be decided for each package by the packager maintainers and security teams, based on the severity of the issue and the resources that we have in terms of packaging and quality assurance.
So, in summary: your Mageia 5 system will not be exposed to known critical vulnerabilities until its EOL in 2 months, but the support will still be much more limited than that of Mageia 6 systems. We encourage the remaining Mageia 5 users to use this time to upgrade to Mageia 6 as soon as possible.
Upgrade advice
Many users reported critical issues when upgrading complex systems to Mageia 6, especially using KDE4, NVIDIA proprietary drivers, and/or third-party packages. Such issues can be package conflicts that prevent the upgrade from finishing properly, leaving the system in a hybrid state that may not properly survive a reboot, or they can be drivers issues that lead to the graphical X.org server failing to initialize itself, landing users on a terminal instead of the desktop environment.
For this reason, we disabled the system that prompts users to upgrade via our GUI tool mgaonline, so only manual upgrades can be done using our CLI tool urpmi. We are still working on solving the main issues mentioned above to allow us to re-enable the mgaonline upgrade path, but we want to warn users that there might still be caveats to this specific upgrade.
When possible, we recommend that Mageia 5 users do a clean install of Mageia 6 on a different partition (thus keeping both systems next to each other), and copy the relevant parts of their Mageia 5 configuration (typically the hidden folders in your /home) onto the new system. It should also work fine to reuse the same /home partition if it’s separate from the root partition. You can even use the same username and UID (user identifier), but keep in mind that systems upgraded from older Mageia releases might still have user IDs starting at 500, while Mageia 6 requires user IDs to start at 1000. There’s a wiki page with some more instructions for upgrade.
When in doubt, please get in touch with other community members on the forums, mailing lists or IRC, there will always be helpful people ready to help you.
We are sorry for the inconvenience and will work hard to provide a more stable upgrade path from Mageia 6 to Mageia 7.
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