Weekly roundup 2017, week 38

Posted on September 23, 2017 by Donald Stewart

Firstly a short apology for the lack of blogs recently. With summertime and other commitments, Mageia has sadly had less time from some contributors recently.

Cauldron

Since it has been 8 weeks since the last update, there have been massive changes to Cauldron. I won’t discuss a of them here, instead, here are a few of the more recent larger changes:

  • Updated Ruby stack
  • Update Perl stack
  • kernel 4.12.14
  • llvm 4.0.1
  • flatpak 0.9.12
  • vim 8.0.1097
  • mesa 17.2.1

There is also the update to the base toolchain, which is requiring large scale rebuilds and will likely cause some issues until everything has settled.

Feature proposals for Mageia 7 are well underway, so if you have anything you would like to see included. or have thoughts on the ideas put forward, now is the time to shape what Mageia 7 will become.

Mageia 6

Since the last roundup, there have been countless updates for Mageia 6, here are a few of the more critical fixes that have gone through QA:

  • tor-0.2.9.12 – CVE fix
  • tomcat-8.0.46 – CVE fixes
  • bluez-5.45-2.1 – CVE fix
  • ffmpeg-3.3.4 – security update
  • kernel-4.9.50 – multiple CVE fixes
  • flash-player-plugin-27.0.0.130 – CVE fixes
  • tcpdump-4.9.2 – multiple CVE fixes

Mageia 5

Like Mageia 6, there have been many updates, again, here is a selection of the more critical fixes:

  • tor-0.2.8.15 – CVE fix
  • tomcat-7.0.81 – CVE fixes
  • bluez-5.28 – CVE fix
  • kernel-4.4.88 – multiple CVE fixes
  • flash-player-plugin-27.0.0.130 – CVE fixes
  • tcpdump-4.9.2 – multiple CVE fixes

Community

The recent campaign from the Free Software Foundation Europe, Public Money, Public Code, that is aiming to have code written with public funding for the public sector released under open licensing is something that Mageia is more than happy to get behind. Such goals that share so many of the principles that Mageia was founded on and that aim to help Open Source deserve all of the support that we can offer – more details available in the blog about our support.

There has also been issues with spam from fresh accounts on the wiki, so sadly we have had to restrict write access until a full solution can be found, in the meantime, if you wish to edit, please contact the doc-discuss mailing list.

Posted in Weekly roundup | 6 Comments

Mageia supports the Public Money, Public Code campaign

Posted on September 21, 2017 by Donald Stewart

Open Source software, or more specifically, the ideals behind it go far beyond Mageia or the wider GNU/Linux Community. Being a part of this is something that Mageia has always been very proud of, and when possible, we have given back to, or helped raise awareness of projects that have similar ideals to our own. So with that in mind, we are very happy to give our full support to the Public Money, Public Code campaign launched by the Free Software Foundation Europe.

The campaign aims to require all code written with public funding for the public sector to be under an open source license. Full details and a video detailing the goals and how they hope to achieve them can be seen on the campaign’s website.

In the week since the campaign launched, many Open Source projects have put their names behind the cause, it is very heartening to see Mageia listed with other Distributions such as Debian, Gentoo and OpenSUSE as well as big projects like GNOME, LibreOffice and KDE. There are also numerous other Linux publications and groups in the list of supporting organisations which is great to see.

We hope that this campaign gains the traction that it deserves and brings about the legislative changes needed to ensure that the public money leads to public code and the plethora of benefits that that would bring.

 

Posted in Collaboration, community | 7 Comments

Weekly roundup 2017 week 28 – 30

Posted on July 31, 2017 by Donald Stewart

So this is the first roundup since the release of Mageia 6, so there are a few more weeks in here than normal.

Cauldron

As expected, Cauldron has been flooded with large updates, and despite their best efforts, everything seems to be working well. Note that big breakage now is very normal, pushing the risky and large scale changes to very low-level things now gives the most room for testing, so things are expected to break. That said, the toolchain and rpm still have some large updates and changes to come, so there is still plenty of opportunity for things to break.

Here are a few of the big updates:

  • Qt 5.9.1
  • Plasma 5.10.4
  • KDE Applications 17.04
  • Kernel 4.9.40
  • Gnome 3.24.3
  • Cinnamon 3.4.4
  • Chromium Browser 59

There have also been updates to the Perl stack, vlc and countless other packages.

Mageia 6

So this is the first time that there has been a Mageia 6 heading here, which is a nice addition, to say the least. It also wouldn’t really be fitting to start this list without there being an entry for flash 🙂 So, here are some of the big updates for Mageia 6:

  • flash-player-plugin-26.0.0.137 – Multiple CVE fixes
  • wine-2.0.2 – Bugfix update
  • mesa-17.1.5 – Bugfix update including Vulkan fixes
  • mariadb-10.1.25 – Bugfix release
  • wireshark-2.2.8 – Multiple CVE fixes
  • rust-1.19.0 and cargo-0.20.0 – New stable release

Several bugfix updates have also been pushed to fix upgrade issues from Mageia 5.

Note that you can consult all update advisories directly on the dedicated page.

Mageia 5

Even though Mageia 6 is available, Mageia 5 is very far from forgotten, here are some of the important updates it has received since the last roundup:

  • flash-player-plugin-26.0.0.137 – Multiple CVE fixes
  • openvpn-2.3.17 – Multiple CVE fixes
  • libgcrypt-1.5.4-5.4 – CVE fix
  • nvidia-current -375.66 & ldetect-lst-0.1.346.6 – Added support for latest 10xx card

 

Posted in Weekly roundup | 4 Comments

Known issues with upgrades from Mageia 5 to Mageia 6

Posted on July 22, 2017 by Donald Stewart

Since the release of Mageia 6 last week, there have been several reports about issues with upgrades from Mageia 5, particularly for users upgrading from KDE 4. While that is not surprising due to the complex nature of the upgrade from KDE 4 to Plasma 5, those issues had sadly not been noticed by our QA team during its extensive pre-release testing.

We want to both acknowledge that we are aware of the issues and working on needed fixes, and make sure that those wanting to upgrade from Mageia 5 are aware of the issues and read the errata beforehand. To avoid bad surprises for the least tech savvy users, we temporarily disabled the upgrade notification that prompts users to upgrade to Mageia 6 from their live session – it will be re-enabled as soon as we are confident that most users will have a smooth upgrade.

Also note that these issues are not present on new installs and the installation experience, particularly switching from KDE 4 to Plasma 5, will be easier with a fresh installation. As such all upgrade issues should be fixable via normal package updates, and no new ISOs are planned.

The section in the Mageia 6 errata relating to upgrades highlights the procedure to minimize some of the known issues. A big thing to note that has caused issues is the use of third party packages installed in Mageia 5, especially NVIDIA graphics drivers from the upstream website (as opposed to the ones packaged by Mageia).

Here is a small summary of things to look out for:

A note on upgrades in general – performing the upgrade offline with the Classical ISO works only if update repositories are enabled, as a full Mageia 5 upgrade requires more packages than are available on the ISO images. The recommended way to start an upgrade is to do it from a non-graphical terminal (e.g. tty2 accessed via Ctrl+Alt+F2) using urpmi, as outlined in the release notes.

If you have any upgrade issue, make sure to reach out with the community on the forums, mailing lists or IRC, where advanced users can help you debug and often fix an apparently broken system.

Apart from those upgrade issues affecting some Mageia 5 systems, most users seem to be pretty happy with Mageia 6 – we will continue showcasing some of the interesting developments made for this release in future blog posts. If you missed it, be sure to check out the last post outlining some of the goodies introduced thanks to the DNF support in Mageia 6.

Posted in Mageia, release, users | 28 Comments

Dandifying Mageia, Part 2

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Neal Gompa

In our previous blog post on “dandifying Mageia” (nearly a year ago!), we introduced DNF in Mageia 6 to the world. Since then, we’ve been keeping pace and tracking upstream development in Cauldron. By working closely with upstream and being actively involved in the development process (which involved reviewing and testing proposed changes), we’ve been able to ensure that the package manager evolves on the right track. This has led to benefits for both us in Mageia as well as Fedora and other projects using DNF (such as the Yocto Project, which adopted DNF with their 2.3 release).

As a consequence of our work to bring you the latest and greatest of package manager technology, Mageia is pleased to be one of the first major Linux distributions to offer DNF 2.x on release! We currently have v2.5.1 of DNF, along with v2.1.1 of the core plugins and v2.0.1 of the extra plugins. DNF is also preinstalled with all fresh installations of Mageia 6, and for those who upgraded from Mageia 5, you can just install the “dnf” package to get it.

DNF running "dnf upgrade" on Mageia 6

DNF running “dnf upgrade” on Mageia 6

For those who prefer a graphical experience with package management, we’ve developed dnfdragora to provide an intuitive graphical frontend similar to rpmdrake. Though unlike rpmdrake, dnfdragora provides native Qt 5, GTK+ 3, and ncurses frontends, so it doesn’t matter what you’re using as your desktop, you’ll have a nice experience with dnfdragora.

Just install the “dnfdragora-qt” or “dnfdragora-gtk” packages for either frontend, or “dnfdragora” for ncurses only.

For those makers and shakers of the world, we have several pieces of exciting news!

We’ve completed the integration of support for Fedora’s COPR service, which means that anyone can now build packages targeting Mageia 6 and Cauldron today on COPR, alongside Fedora and CentOS. For how to use it, see our wiki page on it.

We’re also pleased to announce that both Mageia 6 and the rolling target Mageia Cauldron are supported on the openSUSE Build Service. Because of the OBS interconnection capability, the vast majority of private Open Build Service appliances also now can build packages for Mageia 6 and Mageia Cauldron, too! For how to use it, see our wiki page on it.

In addition, Mageia now fully supports AppStream, the cross-distribution standard for software authors to describe their software for software centers to use. With Mageia 6, software center applications that use AppStream, such as GNOME Software and Plasma Discover, will be fully populated with a representation of the software we ship that provide AppStream information.

Just install the “gnome-software” or “discover” packages to check this out.

However, if you’re using GNOME and install GNOME Software, the GNOME Shell integration will activate the next time you log in, allowing you to use the GNOME Shell search to find applications to install from GNOME Software.

Searching for installable apps through GNOME Shell

Searching for installable apps through GNOME Shell

To add a little cherry on top, if you use GNOME Software to manage your software updates, you’ll be pleased to know that GNOME Software’s Offline Updates functionality works perfectly! It looks rather spiffy, if I do say so myself!

Offline Updates triggered by GNOME Software

Offline Updates triggered by GNOME Software

This is the culmination of two years of work in Mageia and various upstream projects to make this a reality. The upstream software developers, our friends in the Fedora Project and the openSUSE Project, the Mageia packagers, and the Mageia system administrators have all contributed to the success of this technology launching in Mageia 6. All of us hope that all Mageia users will enjoy this in the release of Mageia 6.

Posted in Collaboration, Mageia, packager, release, users | 8 Comments