Some news of what’s boiling in the Cauldron

Posted on December 14, 2015 by Donald Stewart

For those of you who are most familiar with Mageia and its development, you are starting to know the drill: Cauldron is the place where we break stuff by upgrading everything that we tried to keep stable during the previous release cycle, and then we work on making it stable again. We are now in this stabilization phase and we were aiming internally for a first development snapshot of Mageia 6 as a set of ISO images, but there are still a number of factors that make it difficult right now.

The current state of Cauldron is still relatively unstable, with major updates to the key base system components and to the major desktops. This has led to both the generated classical and live ISOs not being of a quality that we are willing to release.

Therefore, we plan to release the first ISOs within the first weeks of 2016, and then continue with the regular schedule from there. The first testing done on an internal set of ISOs was not in vain though, as it helped us to better assess the current state of Cauldron and how it behaves with the installer, and our packagers are already hard at work fixing the identified issues.

With the development of Mageia 6, we are looking at restructuring what images we release, as we noticed that the purpose of the English-only 32-bit LiveCDs and the limited dual-arch DVD was often misunderstood (and therefore badly impacted on Mageia’s image for users of those ISOs). We want to create a set of media that fit better with the use cases to make Mageia even more accessible.  Furthermore, we are renaming the pre-release ISOs to development and stabilization snapshots, as we feel it gives a better indication of what can be expected from them.

If you would like to get involved now, information on testing and running Cauldron can be found here.

We will soon publish an indicative development roadmap so that you know more precisely when to expect the future releases.

Posted in packager, QA, users | 10 Comments

Mageia was at the Paris Open Source Summit 2015

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Rémi Verschelde

The Paris Open Source Summit is a great European event centered on the free & open source sector. It arose as a result of the merger of two French open source events: Linux Solutions (formerly in La Défense) and the Open World Forum. This year’s edition took place on November the 18th and 19th in “Les docks de Paris” (North suburbs).

Mageia had three contributors glad to be there: dtux, magnux and lebarhon. Our booth was small but of professional quality with many interesting things:

  • to show, two laptops with Mageia 5 and the upcoming Mageia 6/Plasma 5,
  • for sale, beautiful wooden USB sticks, unfortunately a delivery problem prevented us to sell T-shirts,
  • to offer, stickers and fliers.

usb_key_mageia_2015_3

The first day began with a bomb alert (false alert fortunately), but the building has been evacuated and the event really started only at 10 a.m. We met lots of different kinds of people:

  • some regular visitors, who we already met last year and before. They came to say “hello”, to hear some news and share their opinions about Mageia and rare minor problems,
  • some unhappy people, complaining that Mageia 4 was much better. We were sad to hear that, reported their problems and hope they are going to be fixed,
  • some happy people thanking us because Mageia 5 is much better than was Mageia 4. At least there is a good solution for everyone 🙂
  • two people looking for business partners, yes Mageia is taken seriously as a professional solution!
  • almost nobody that did not know Mageia. From our experience on this event, this is new, last year (May 2014, i.e. 18 months ago) many visitors had never heard of Mageia,
  • and two other Mageia community members, tuxmips and baud.

It has been a very happy two-day show, not at all affected by the tragic events in Paris. Since it was the first year the event took place in this location, it is not easy to compare the crowd with that of last year, but it seemed more or less equivalent. What really changed in our opinion is that Mageia is now well-known, and that’s definitely encouraging!

Posted in Atelier, community, events, users | 10 Comments

SIVEO joins the Mageia community to boost the development of the PULSE software

Posted on November 17, 2015 by Donald Stewart

We have a newcomer in the Mageia ecosystem: the young French company SIVEO has taken over the development of the open source server-related solutions of the former Mandriva, and they decided to base all their products on Mageia. Giving back to the community, they are now employing a long-time Mageia contributor and maintainer of the KDE stack, Nicolas Lécureuil (neoclust), to work on packaging their free software products in Mageia. The following is a joint press release by SIVEO and Mageia.org.

The project originally named LRS Linbox FAS PULSE then renamed by Mandriva in 2007, is now an opensource solution for asset management. It’s used as well by small or medium entreprise as by very big companies, and both private and public accounts.

Believing in the potential of PULSE, SIVEO is rising up to the challenge of making it a major open source solution for asset management. Key people who were already working on development of this project joined SIVEO. They now bring their skills, know-how and enthusiasm to the company.

In parallel to this and to fully anchor it into the open source world, SIVEO naturally approached the Mageia community by providing the PULSE project and its distribution allowing the enlargement of the Community basis.

“This way, we want to open the project and bring more resources while federating different players whether professionals, ordinary users or contributors,” recalled Yvan Manon, who has been involved in the PULSE project for a long time and is nowadays pre-sales engineer at SIVEO.

“To welcome new contributors is always a very positive thing for the Mageia community. The packaging of a professional solution of the quality of PULSE is an undeniable asset for the distribution, to further engage with the world of commerce and our business users – and hopefully encourage more to participate. The collaboration of a large company and the validity it gives to the quality of the Mageia distribution is also a large endorsment of the work done by the Mageia community,” says the Mageia Council.

PULSE is a complete solution to manage the life cycle of the workstation, which allows industrialization and automating heavy and time-consuming tasks on complex and remote networks. Its main features are:

  • create and deploy sysprep disk image
  • identify, deploy applications and patches
  • backup
  • make decision
  • remote access
  • overseeing the compliance and configurations of all assets

Finally, interoperability and agility facilitate its integration with the various components (LDAP, AD, GLPI, OCS Inventory Fusion, etc.) of an information system. SIVEO offers packaged version with support for distributions such as Debian, RedHat and CentOS, and any additional services (audit, installation, training) to ensure professional quality and serenity.

SIVEO is an infrastructure automation software company; it is a young company creates innovative in November 2008. First French company labelled in the INTEL CLOUD Builder initiative for its eVA solution, SIVEO works with publishers, SSII, public and private accounts.

Mageia.org is a French non-profit association with groups contributing together into a community. The Mageia community builds a GNU/Linux distribution with the goal of providing an easy to use and highly reliable operating system with the choice and scalability offered by the Linux infrastructure. Mageia has delivered 5 releases since 2011, with the next release, Mageia 6, already taking shape with a scheduled release date in 2016.

More about Pulse: siveo.net/solutions/pulse
Source code (GPL): https://github.com/pulse-project/

Posted in Collaboration, Mageia, SIVEO | 8 Comments

Made in Mageia: ISOdumper

Posted on September 19, 2015 by Donald Stewart

Two events are competing for your attention in the Mageia world today: the international Software Freedom Day, and Mageia 4’s EOL, effective immediately.

For the former, we want to wish you all a merry Software Freedom Day and hope that had the opportunity to attend one of the numerous related events.

For the latter, we can only encourage you again to upgrade to Mageia 5 as soon as possible so that you can benefit from further security fixes and bugfix updates. The full blog post about this can be read here. At this occasion, we would like to present to you a home-brewed tool that facilitates dumping ISO images to USB sticks; particularly handy if you’d like to upgrade to Mageia 5 using the classical installer DVD.

ISOdumper, image dumping made easy

Several programs are available for dumping ISO boot images to USB sticks – for installing the operating system. Doing this by hand is hazardous: a mistake can overwrite a disc partition. Mageia has its own package, ISOdumper, which does a lot more than the basic task. It is available from normal repositories, you can install it through the Mageia Control Center or Add/Remove software. The latest release is 0.42.

Isodumper10

 

It is a GUI program which requires, and solicits, root privileges. In every case you must choose in the ‘Device’ list the USB stick you wish to use.

  • ‘Write image’ is the basic task, for which you select the ISO image (*.iso) to write to the USB stick. But ISOdumper has a plus: it calculates the MD5 and SHA1 checksums – displayed in the ‘Details’ panel – enabling confirmation of the written ISO image if you have its original checksums to compare with.
  • ‘Backup in’ is a very handy facility for backing up the current USB stick formating & contents to an image file on your disk (*.img); from which it can be subsequently restored by the ‘Write image’ function. This enables you, for example, to use temporarily a USB stick for ISO booting without sacrificing its previous content.
  • ‘Format device’ not only offers a frequently sought but often hard-to-find facility for formatting USB sticks, with the plus of offering several filesystem types: FAT, NTFS, ext.

ISOdumper has its own wiki page with detailed usage instructions. Its code is hosted at Mageia’s git repositories, and you can also download the 0.42 release source tarball directly.

Development history

We had a tool named usb-imagewriter in our repositories to dump ISO images on USB sticks, but it was limited to deal with .img files, and the progress bar wasn’t working. A Mageia user and contributor, Papoteur, thus started to hack it, and as it was not maintained upstream anymore, had to fork the project.

He then added a feature for backup which creates a snapshot of the USB stick content before writing the ISO image. Some users complained that it was difficult to recover the device when the installation was done, thus Papoteur also added a simple feature to format the stick.

On the technical side, the tool is written in Python and uses GTK+/Glade UI library. The traditional dd command is replaced with customized writing functions and USB detection uses Udisks2 tools. The formatting feature is a tool from Clément Lefebvre (Mint).

We all thank Papoteur for his work on this handy tool! Have fun with ISOdumper and Mageia 5! And farewell Mageia 4, you were a great release! 🙂

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Mageia 4 about to reach its end-of-life

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Rémi Verschelde

As you may know, our policy is to support stable releases for 18 months; Mageia 4 was released on February 1st, 2014, so it should have been supported until August 1st, 2015.

However, due to the delayed release of Mageia 5, we chose to extend the support period of our previous release to give you more time to upgrade your systems.

That brought the new end-of-life (EOL) date for Mageia 4 to September 19th, 2015, i.e. 3 months after the release of Mageia 5. 

As we are now very close to this date, we wanted to give you a heads-up in case you haven’t done the upgrade yet: after September 19th, Mageia 4 will not receive any new security or bugfix update, so you are encouraged to do the upgrade as soon as possible.

Most users who did the upgrade had a smooth experience, just make sure to check the wiki to see how to do it. Feel free to ask for help on IRC, the forums or the mailing list if you need further guidance to upgrade to Mageia 5.

Posted in Uncategorized | 14 Comments