Good things come to those who wait… Mageia 6 dev1 is here.

Posted on March 27, 2016 by Donald Stewart

After the delays caused by upgrading the major parts of the base system and switching to the Plasma 5 Desktop Environment, we are very happy to announce that the first development milestone of Mageia 6 has been released and is ready for testing by the community.

Note that only the classical ISO images have been released, those being the i586 and x86_64 DVD images. The live ISO images are not quite ready. If the live images can be made functional soon, they may also be released, otherwise they will come with the next milestone release.

The extra time we have had has allowed for newer versions of Plasma, GNOME, and other major components. Also, it has allowed us to provide support for newer hardware thanks to an updated kernel.

Mageia 6 dev1 will ship with the following:

  • Kernel 4.4.5
  • Glibc 2.22
  • Plasma 5.5.95
  • GNOME 3.19.2
  • Mate 1.13.0
  • Cinnamon 2.8.6
  • LibreOffice 5.1.1.3
  • Firefox 45
  • Chromium 49
  • Updates to all of the other major applications and tools

Also note that at the time of release, our online repositories already provide updates to Plasma 5.6.0 and GNOME 3.20.0.

If you would like to test these ISO’s, you can find a link to download them from your preferred mirror on the Mageia website. Please keep in mind that this is still an early development snapshot.  We would appreciate any feedback on how this release works for you. Reports can be made in the Mageia Bugzilla. As always, the ISO’s have been fully tested by our QA team to ensure that they are as usable as possible. If you would like to help with this task or any other parts of Mageia development, please have a look here to find out about ways to get involved. We always welcome new contributors.

In other development news, the ARM port is close to being ready for use, so watch out for an announcement about that soon. We have also hired a graphic designer to help refresh the look of the Mageia tools. Finally, work on DNF, mirrorbrain, other features and goodies continues.

The proposed features for Mageia 6 and the work that is happening on them can be seen here. If you would like to contribute to these, feel free to join the dev mailing list.

Posted in alpha, community, Mageia, QA, release, test | 17 Comments

Mageia was at SCaLE 14x

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Donald Stewart

Mageia made it to SCaLE 14x for the first time in sunny California, with one of our dedicated QA deputy leaders to man the booth.

Bill Kenney, or wilcal as he is known here, did an amazing job running the Mageia booth at SCaLE. This is an extract from his report on the event.

The Mageia booth was located right in the centre of the Pasadena Convention Center on January 22nd – 24th. Friday saw the highest traffic, Saturday was quieter, but lots of families came down to see the exhibits, which is always nice to see.
Our booth was next to SUSE’s, and sharing the running of the booths was a great show of community and cooperation between Linux projects.

scale2016_01

We had Hewlett Packard Enterprise as neighbors; they were running an almost continuous magic and tricks show which always ensured a big crowd in front of the Mageia booth. I made the decision not to give away some kind of “swag” and that was a good decision as I would have needed thousands of items. Also, I opted to put the Mageia literature (English and French) in displays rather then giving pieces of paper away. Again a good decision, as most people just took pictures of the literature if they wanted a copy.

The principal thrust here was to show the Mageia flag, sharing its history and talking about the present and future status. That was the right message. There were lots of people who simply already knew about the Mandrake → Mandriva → Mageia fork tree and most of the time was spent reminiscing about old times with Mandrake. Many indicated that Mandrake was their first Linux distro.

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The organizers of SCaLE 14x were appreciative of Mageia making a presence at SCaLE and are certainly open to us returning next year.

Here’s a picture of the Mageia stand with Bill there.scale2016_08

Here’s an 8 min video that Bill shot of the show. Most of the “footage” was shot before show hours. At times this venue was packed with Linux geeks. Enjoy the show:

Posted in community, events, Mageia, users | 2 Comments

Chemnitz Linux Days 2016

Posted on March 13, 2016 by Rémi Verschelde

CLT2016As it does every year in March, the German event Chemnitz Linux Days will take place during the coming week-end (19th and 20th of March). And as almost every year we are pleased to attend the event and present our distribution there. Please come around and discuss with us the current release as well the upcoming version 6, which is in preparation right now. We will also have nice USB sticks and other Mageia goodies to hand out 🙂

Beside our booth, you will find many other interesting projects and companies from the open source community. Furthermore there will be interesting talks, workshops and even activities especially for the younger guests.

Please come along to have a nice and informative weekend with us in Chemnitz.

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Posted in community, events, Mageia, users | 3 Comments

Come and meet us at FOSDEM 2016 in Brussels

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Rémi Verschelde

Fosdem 2016 banner

The 2016 edition of the FOSDEM is approaching, and as usual Mageia will hold a booth there with many contributors and community members. It’s probably the biggest free software event in Europe, and also the event where Mageia has the biggest presence. It’s also our yearly occasion for the General Assembly of the Mageia.Org association which supports your favourite distro, plus the legendary Mageia dinner on Saturday evening where you are of course all very welcome! 🙂

The event takes place in Brussels on Saturday 30th and Sunday 31st of January at the ULB Solbosch Campus (Université libre de Bruxelles), and our booth will be as usual at the 1st level of Building K. You will of course find some nice goodies like stickers, flyers, pens, USB sticks and T-shirts, but also have the possibility to discuss with many contributors, get Mageia 5 installed or see a preview of what’s currently boiling in the Cauldron!

If you plan to join us there, don’t forget to put your name in the event preparation wiki page. Even if you’re not planning to help man the booth or register for the dinner, it’s still nice to know who to expect for the event attendants. For those interested in attending to the General Assembly (you are all very welcome!), we will soon post the details about the room and time schedule.

Looking forward to meeting many community members in Brussels!

Posted in community, events, Mageia, users | 5 Comments

Our First Backport – HPLIP 3.15.11

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Donald Stewart

Firstly, Happy Holidays to everyone, we all hope that you have a nice festive season and that the New Years brings good fortune. But back to the business at hand…

The backport repositories exist so that we can provide updates to software that are needed by some users, or provide significant feature improvements but which are potentially disruptive to installed stable systems.

This is the case with the latest version of the HP printer and scanner software (hplip), which adds support for some new devices, but which our QA testing found to be incompatible with some existing devices.

Further details of the devices that are supported by hplip-3.15.11 can be found in the hplip release notes.

A list of HP printers and the required minimum version of hplip can be seen here and the new printers that are supported by this backport are listed here.

The new version of the hplip packages are now available in the Core Backports repository.

If you have a new HP printer or scanner which does not function properly with Mageia 5, you may require these packages.

Installing backports in Mageia is quite simple:

In rpmdrake, “Install & Remove Software”, select backports from the first drop-down filter. If a previous version is installed the available packages will be marked in the status column with a down arrow with a line above it in a red circle. Select and install the packages appropriate for your architecture.

It is NOT necessary to enable the Backports repository.

Posted in Mageia, packager, QA, Uncategorized, users | 16 Comments