Weekly roundup 2017, week 23

Posted on June 10, 2017 by Donald Stewart

Cauldron

So Cauldron is in release freeze now, and new ISOs have been built. Tests so far are looking good, there was one issue with initial application launches on the Plasma live build causing a freeze on some occasions, but it’s being worked on so there should be a fix soon.

Update wise, Cauldron has been quiet with the main activity on bug fixes, here are some of the main ones:

  • sugar desktop
  • kodi
  • qemu
  • perl

Most of the Mageia specific tools: urpmi, rpmdrake and the control centre have been updated to fix some missing translations.

That said, there were a few version updates, here are some of the main ones:

  • packagekit 1.1.6
  • kernel 4.9.31
  • ffmpeg 3.3.2
  • mesa 17.1.2

Mageia 5

There have been lots of updates for Mageia 5 this week, here is a selection of the main ones:

  • sympa 6.1.25 – bugfix updates
  • puppet 3.6.2-3.1 – CVE fix
  • nss 3.28.5 – CVE fix
  • ansible 2.3.1.0-2 – multiple CVE fixes
  • dropbear 2014.66-1.3 CVE fixes
Posted in Weekly roundup | 9 Comments

Weekly roundup 2017 – week 22

Posted on June 4, 2017 by Donald Stewart

Cauldron

The big news for Mageia 6 is that we are entering release freeze imminently, this means that any further updates to Cauldron must be for a very specific reason, like a critical bug fix or similar. This will allow for the final ISO building and testing get underway, so Mageia 6 will be released soon.

Updates wise, there has been a few for Cauldron with various packages getting updates to ease maintainability for the Mageia 6 life cycle. Here is a selection of the major ones:

  • filezilla 3.26.1
  • puppet 4.2.1
  • nouveau 1.0.15
  • sudo 1.8.20p2
  • fotoxx 17.04.2
  • darktable 2.2.5
  • enlightenment 0.21.8

There was also a kernel update, while this wasn’t a new version it did bring fixes for an IOMMU bug on AMD systems and Intel i915 fixes.

Mageia 5

There have been a number of bugfix and security updates for Mageia 5, here is a selection of them:

  • mariadb 10.0.31 – various upstream bugfixes
  • vlc 2.2.6 – security update
  • openvpn 2.3.16 – multiple CVE fixes
  • git 2.7.4-1.1 – CVE fix
  • pcmanfm 1.2.3-2.3 – CVE fix

Community

There are some shows and events coming up soon, so we are looking to get in new goodies and to replace the used stock, one of the ideas that we were going to try was badges, this is one of the designs we were thinking of, what do you think of this? We were also looking for other ideas, currently, we have stickers, pens, USB keys and t-shirts, there was also a cup design, is this something that you would like to see at an event, or is there something else that you think would be good to have?

 

Posted in Atelier, community, Weekly roundup | 16 Comments

Weekly roundup 2017 – week 21

Posted on May 27, 2017 by Donald Stewart

So the biggest news this week has been the Mageia 6 RC release. We are all really happy with it and with the feedback that we are getting so far, so a big thanks to all of the testers and to everyone that helped with packaging, QA, bug triage, ISO building and all of the other things needed to get a release out.

Cauldron

Despite the release, there has still been plenty of work on Cauldron, the biggest update is to Plasma 5.8.7, but as this is a pretty critical piece, it went first to the Updates Testing repository to check everything over before being moved to the Core Release repository today. Mageia-prime was also updated in the testing repository, so if you use Nvidia Optimus and want to test it, feel free to have a look. Other updates include:

  • smplayer 17.5.0
  • docker 17.03.1
  • webkit 2.16.3
  • qbittorrent 3.3.12
  • flatpak 0.9.4
  • networkmanager 1.8.0
  • kernel 4.9.30
  • efl 1.9.1
  • thunderbird 52.1.1
  • firefox 52.1.2
  • samba 4.5.9

In total there were around 250 package updates since last week, so a busy week all around.

Mageia 5

Now that the QA team has more time, a large number of updates were validated for Mageia 5, here is a selection:

  • webmin 1.840 – CVE and bugfix
  • flash-player-plugin 25.0.0.171 – multiple CVE fixes
  • vlc 2.2.5.1 – CVE and bugfix
  • samba 3.6.25-2.7 – multiple CVE fixes
  • kernel 4.4.68 – multiple CVE fixes

Community

Lastly, but very much not least, the forums are back with all of the history intact which is very welcome so you can report on any testing that you do with the RC there, on the mailing lists or on our Bugzilla.
We really appreciate your patience and understanding with the downtime.

Posted in community, Weekly roundup | 8 Comments

Mageia 6 RC, we are nearly there

Posted on May 24, 2017 by Donald Stewart

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

Posted in community, Mageia, QA, release | 30 Comments

Weekly roundup 2017 – week 20

Posted on May 20, 2017 by Donald Stewart

Cauldron

We have just had a new build of the Live ISOs, while the Classical ISO build is underway to fix a glib bug that was causing LibreOffice to use 100% CPU, so getting that fixed was very good. The ISOs are looking very good now.

Updates wise, there has been good activity in Cauldron, here is a selection of what has been updated since last week:

  • lyx 2.2.3
  • libreoffice 5.3.3.2
  • postgresql9.4 9.4.12
  • postgresql9.6 9.6.3
  • ffmpeg 3.3.1

There were also updates to Mate, with some of its packages being upgraded to 1.18.2 and the nodejs, jboss and maven stacks saw upgrades too, there are so many packages in these stacks that listing them all didn’t make much sense.

Mageia 5

There has been a number of updates released for Mageia 5 this week, you can see the full list of recent updates here, here is a list of new updates this week:

  • mhonarc 2.6.19 – CVE fix
  • radicale 1.1.1 – CVE fix
  • asterisk 11.23.1 – bugfix

Community

A quick note from the Council meeting this week, we were discussing the upcoming RMLL event and what we wanted to bring to it and the stock levels of the goodies that we do have. We decided that we would need to reorder lots of items, as the pens and wood USB sticks seemed to go down well, they and any other ideas put forward will be available at events. We wanted to try and use as sustainable products as possible, so, with that in mind, if anyone has any designs, ideas or suppliers, let the atelier mailing list know and we’ll see what we can do.

A short roundup this week, due to lots of time being put into getting the RC released, we will try and get you a bigger one for next week.

Posted in Weekly roundup | 7 Comments