Mageia 5 Support Extension and General Update

Posted on November 24, 2016 by Donald Stewart

With the delays to Mageia 6 and the approaching initial end of life (EOL) for Mageia 5 (initially planned for early December), we felt that it would be good to give an update on where things were with both Mageia 5 and 6.

Firstly, every release so far has been supported until 3 months after the next release, and Mageia 5 will be no different. Since Mageia 6 is being delayed, Mageia 5’s support is automatically extended in order to give users 3 months to upgrade before Mageia 5 stops receiving security updates.

We will also be releasing the Mageia 5.1 ISOs very soon (They are hopefully in their final round of testing now). This will allow for new systems to be installed with all the updates that Mageia 5 has received. As for Mageia 4.1, these are new ISOs of the same release, so the installed Mageia 5.1 systems will rely on the same Mageia 5 repositories and will get the same support. We will announce the final EOL as soon as Mageia 6 is released, but you can already count on more than 3 months for now.

Secondly, Mageia 6 has not been forgotten. We had issues with the ISO building server but now that these have been resolved and progress on 5.1 is good, the next milestone release towards Mageia 6 will shortly follow the release of Mageia 5.1. Developers have of course not been idle even though no ISOs were produced, and Cauldron is in a very good shape with many updates and fixes, so we hope that the next milestones (stabilisation snapshot 2, release candidate(s), final) will arrive soon and close to each other.

In other news, we had a booth at the Paris Open Source Summit, a full write up will follow shortly.

Image source – https://xkcd.com/606/

Posted in Mageia, release, security, users | 13 Comments

Our warm thanks to a long time contributor and friend

Posted on October 3, 2016 by Rémi Verschelde

Thomas SpuhlerIt is with a heavy heart that we address our warmest thanks to our friend Thomas Spuhler for his Mandriva and Mageia contributions over the last decade. After fighting colon cancer for over a year, he finally had to surrender on Saturday September 17, 2016, at the age of 68. He leaves behind his beloved wife, sons and grandchildren, to whom our thoughts go in this difficult time.

Thomas had been contributing to Mageia, and Mandriva before that, since 2009 as a packager, and much earlier already partaking in email discussions and bug reports. His packaging interests were mostly web and server-related components, for which his contributions were invaluable. He had to step back from his Mageia responsibilities in early August due to his health condition.

He was a lively fellow and we will sorely miss him. He was particularly fond of the Oro Valley in Arizona, USA, where he had been living for the last 20 years, and which gave him his IRC nickname (Oro_Valley).

Pusch Ridge from Oro Valley

Pusch Ridge from Oro Valley, © CC BY-SA 3.0 Dan Huff

Again, thanks a lot for everything Thomas, it was great having you around for all those years!

Posted in community, Mageia, packager, They Make Mageia | 10 Comments

Mageia was at Fete de l’Huma

Posted on September 27, 2016 by Donald Stewart

Magnux77 with Daniel were there representing Mageia. He reports:

It was hot, in all the meanings of the word, a real jolly atmosphere, noise everywhere and nicely sunny. With Daniel, we laid out the T-Shirts, pens, USB sticks, two laptops for Mageia demonstrations, a 2002 antiquity running Mageia to prove that if it no longer works with Windows, it can with Mageia, and a 24–inch screen for a Mageia LibreOffice Impress exhibition on Raspberry-Pi. Our booth was next to La Mouette and l’Autre Net.  Behind us was  April, Framasoft, The Ordis Libres.

Admittedly, many people walked past us without even seeing us, there are so many things to see, to read or to hear, not to mention savour. But the ones who did stop and wonder already have the idea that GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft) isn’t just for their good only. A little vignette, amongst others:

Madam and Sir, holding each other up to support themselves in the face of adversity, have a quick look at all the booths, but none of them really catches their eye. They talk together, hesitate, look here and there again, are ready to go away, discouraged, when suddenly, Madam gets worked up, stands and says a little louder:

“But I am still eager to know!”

“To know what, Madam?”

“Well, computing, it pisses me off (with a wide smile). I bought a pair of shoes on the Internet, and now I got advertising everywhere for shoes, on my screen, in my messages and that  pisses me off even more (no more smile)”

“Then, I would like to know why, how is it possible”

After a small discussion, they don’t look ready for me to talk about Mageia right way, then I decided to take them to our friends from Framasoft so that they can start to defend themselves against the GAFAM.

But for many people who were sensitive to our arguments, and likely to adopt Mageia, the difficulty was the installation with backup and partitioning. Of course, we gave our e-mails, MLO address (the French forum),  the GUL (Linux user group), but it is not enough, of course… To all of you with whom we exchanged details, don’t hesitate to contact us again for help, to get an idea on how to, or to find help in your area of France.

– dtux in Lyon, in his workshop Libre PC

– magnux77 in the East of Paris or on the French-speaking forum MageiaLinux-Online (MLO).

For International users, we have many other support forums available.

Posted in Atelier, community, events, Mageia, users | 4 Comments

Announcing upcoming Mageia 5.1 ISOs and an update on Mageia 6 progress

Posted on September 17, 2016 by Donald Stewart

It is likely not news to you that we are behind the original schedule regarding Mageia 6.
As a community-led distro with a limited amount of resources and contributors, we stand by “Release when it’s ready” and don’t want to rush a release out until we are fully happy with it. Obviously, we are not yet fully happy with Mageia 6, though it is shaping up pretty well! On the other hand, we are still very pleased with Mageia 5 and want to continue supporting it until Mageia 6 is ready to take over.

Upcoming Mageia 5.1 ISOs

Because of this delay, we will release updated ISO images of Mageia 5 to bridge the gap until Mageia 6 is ready.

The new Mageia 5.1 ISOs will include all the security and bug-fix updates released for Mageia 5 so far, including an updated LTS kernel (4.4.x) for improved hardware support.

Like it was done for Mageia 4.1, this does not constitute a new release per se, but an easier way to install an up-to-date Mageia 5. Existing Mageia 5 users won’t have to reinstall anything, as their up-to-date system is already the same as what the 5.1 images would install. New users, however, would
benefit from having the well-tested kernel 4.4 from the start, instead of starting with the original kernel 3.19 of Mageia 5.

We will likely extend the support period for Mageia 5 to cover at least 3 months of transition after the Mageia 6 release. The exact updated end-of-life date will be given when the 5.1 ISOs are released.

Infra back on track for Mageia 6

There have been some infrastructure issues causing delays to getting ISOs to build, which particularly impacted the internal testing for Mageia 6’s stabilisation snapshot 2 over the last few months. These have now been mostly resolved, and our ISO building team (and its new recruits!) will have the opportunity to fine tune the process with the updated Mageia 5 ISOs, before going back to Mageia 6.

The delays have allowed for newer versions of some key software stacks to be included. Plasma has matured a lot and gained stability and feature completeness over the last few months, and we will be able to ship Mageia 6 with Plasma 5.8 LTS. We will also include GNOME 3.22 which is currently being prepared for Cauldron.

Packagers and developers toiling on release blockers

The main reason for Mageia 6’s delay is, of course, the remaining blocking bugs (so called release blockers) that we don’t want to compromise on fixing before the release.

Packagers and developers are currently working to fix the remaining release blockers. A new tool has been promptly developed in Mageia App DB to help visualise the progress on the current release blockers. We hope to have the second stabilisation snapshot available soon after the Mageia 5.1 ISOs are released, likely sometime in October 2016. As for the final release, we do not want to give a precise ETA yet, but we should manage to make a 2016 release 🙂

As always, many hands make light work, so if you’re interested in ISO testing, QA, packaging or just want to get involved with Mageia, please have a look here for further details on getting involved.

Posted in Mageia, QA, release | 15 Comments

Dandifying Mageia – Adding the DNF stack to Mageia

Posted on September 4, 2016 by Neal Gompa

There’s a lot of good things coming to Mageia 6: KDE Plasma 5 desktop, updates to other desktop environments, many new games, and a fresh coat of paint with a new visual style. However, there’s quite a lot of under-the-hood improvements in Mageia, too!

Among the many less-than-visible improvements across the board is a brand new dependency resolver: DNF. DNF (Dandified Yum) is a next generation dependency resolver and high-level package management tool with an interesting history. DNF traces its ancestry to two projects: Fedora’s Yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) and openSUSE’s SAT Solver (libsolv). DNF was forked from Yum several years ago in order to rewrite it to use the SAT Solver library from openSUSE (which is used in their own tool, Zypper). Another goal of the fork was to massively restructure the codebase so that a sane API would be available for both extending DNF (via plugins and hooks) and building applications on top of it (such as graphical frontends and system lifecycle automation frameworks).

DNF will be available for those willing to use it, however, urpmi and the current familiar Mageia software management tools will remain as the default in Mageia for the foreseeable future.

In many respects, these goals were achieved. DNF ships with a well-structured command line interface, an easy-to-use and very complete API, a dozen core plugins, and a dozen contributed plugins.

As a consequence of the work required to adopt DNF, Mageia is now broadly compatible with a wider array of tools for managing RPM-based systems, due to the use of tooling that is common to other major RPM-based Linux distributions (such as Fedora and openSUSE). For example, tools like Spacewalk and Katello will (to some extent) be able to manage Mageia 6 systems for institutions like schools and businesses.

PackageKit has been also switched to a new backend that leverages the work done to enable DNF, allowing for us to properly enable app-centric software management tools like GNOME Software and KDE’s Plasma Discover to provide a high-quality desktop software management experience through the desktop environment’s native tools.

In addition, we’re working with the developers of Fedora COPR (A PPA-style system developed and provided by our friends at the Fedora Project) to get Mageia 6 and Cauldron added as supported Linux distributions. This will allow people interested in providing packages of free/open source software for Mageia to have a place where they can build them and have a hosted package repository. Once support for Mageia has been activated on Fedora COPR, adding repositories will be as easy as “dnf copr enable”.

One of the fruits borne from this effort is that support for building packages for Mageia 6 is now built right into Mock, the standard clean package build tool used by Red Hat, Fedora, and CentOS. As of Mock 1.2.18 and newer (available on supported RHEL/CentOS and Fedora releases, as well as in the upcoming Mageia 6), it is possible to build Mageia packages without having to switch distributions or manually construct chroots, containers, or virtual machines. Likewise, with Mageia 6, it is possible to build Fedora packages using the same tool. Of course, you can build Mageia packages from Mageia 6 with Mock as well. Mock is the core build engine for Fedora COPR, so it was critical to make this work, and so we did.

The work to offer DNF in Mageia 6 represents nearly a year of work, collaborating and cooperating with the upstream project and the Fedora Project to implement this in the best way possible. We hope that the introduction of DNF and the new PackageKit backend will offer a new, user-friendly way for people to interact with the software installed and available on Mageia!

If you want to learn more about DNF, check out our wiki page on how to use it.

Posted in Collaboration, Mageia, packager | 48 Comments