Fosdem 2015, looking back with pleasure.

Posted on February 11, 2015 by grenoya

It’s one week later, but we’re still full of inspiration from the great time we had at FOSDEM.

We’ve been very privileged to be able to be there (again), to meet one another, to meet many interested visitors at our booth, to meet great people from other projects, to go to talks on a wide variety of Open Source related subjects, to have the General Assembly, to work together on bugs and improvements, to enjoy the Mageia dinner together.

Hey, did I just finish my report? 😉

You’ll want to know more. Who of us were there? Check our wiki page: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Fosdem_2015

Some others would have been there, too, but were hindered by circumstances that suddenly occurred. Many more would have been there, if they hadn’t lived too far away or been too busy with other things that must come first, or if the costs hadn’t been too high.

We hope that one day (one FOSDEM) it’ll be possible for all who’d like to, to be there!

It was very nice to meet some contributors we had never met before, and to enjoy their very positive input. 

It was just as nice to see all contributors we had already met before, and to enjoy their everlasting good spirits.

And it was great to meet many Mageia users and people who wanted to learn more about Mageia.

Colin and tmb spent much of their time attending talks about key components in Mageia, catching up with various upstream projects and people. In between they’ve been working in the back of our booth (tmb even managed to push new kernels to Mageia 4 updates_testing) and kindly responding to requests we had (For who doesn’t know: they are sysadmins and also maintain very important core packages, so they get more than their share of questions and requests).

All who helped at the booth did a very good job managing it and supplying information, CDs and stickers to visitors and selling Mageia t-shirts to those who liked to have one. Saturday was a remarkably busy day at the stand. It was good to notice that visitors who had never heard of Mageia before, have become rare.

Ennael miraculously managed to keep the General Assembly within the one-hour time frame we had, at the same time leading it into being a very constructive, but also relaxed, meeting, in spite of the fact that we could have used some more time. A link to a summary of the GA will be added later.

Before and after the GA, too, many of us have used the time together to work on improving Mageia, ranging from improving a buggy script to finding a solution for unwanted greylisting of a contributor to working on AdminPanel (the libyui port of our drakxtools), and much more.

Of course there was also time for meals (and Mageia Dinner!) together, for enjoying Belgian beers and even for long walks for those who enjoy that. In general: there was plenty of time for having fun together, and we fully used and enjoyed that time.

We hope we’ll meet you there next year!

Posted in events, Mageia | 2 Comments

FOSDEM is coming!

Posted on January 28, 2015 by grenoya

And Mageia will be there!

FOSDEM 2015 will be this weekend (January 31-February 1), and we plan on being there! How about you?
As the previous 4 years (here, here, here and here), we will have a booth in Building K, first floor with T-shirts, flyers, CDs and stickers! And contributors to talk to! Have you ever wondered who the faces are behind all the hard work that goes into your favorite distro? Wonder no more! Just come meet us! We promise not to bite.
We will be showing off Mageia 5 Beta 2, so you can catch a glimpse of what’s planned for our March release.
We will also have our annual General Assembly which is another occasion to see how Mageia works and discuss with us: join us at 16h in building H room h3.228 .
And most importantly, we will have our annual Mageia Dinner! If you want to come, put your name down on the Wiki .

We hope to see you there!

Posted in events, Mageia | 1 Comment

Mageia 5 beta 2 is out! A story of badluck

Posted on January 16, 2015 by grenoya

After several delays the beta 2 version of Mageia 5 is finally out! You can find more information here.

But, it seems that yet again we need to postpone the Mageia 5 release.

Due to various difficulties with EFI boot, grub 2 and a few other things, we need a little more time. Only a few members of our QA team have EFI-based machines, so if you do have such equipment please test Beta 2 and report your experience.

Our QA, Packagers and ISO teams are working around the clock to bring us all a stable and secure release, but they still need to work out a few kinks.

Therefore, we are planning one more Beta release before the release candidate. So the final timeline looks like this:

  • Beta 3 – February 3
  • RC – February 24
  • Final release – March 10

We’re sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and understanding, and in case you were wondering if there’s anything you could do to help, just ask the teams!

We need as many people as possible to try this beta in order to identify any remaining problems. Please report any problems that you experience in the forums, mailing lists or, preferably, in bugzilla. Also don’t forget to check the errata.

Posted in alpha, bugsquad, packager, QA, release, test | 28 Comments

Christmas rest for the braves

Posted on December 22, 2014 by MrsB

christmas_back_homeWe planned initially to release Mageia 5 beta 2 around the 16th of December. We still have some work left to complete to release a proper beta 2 that would drive us through to the final release.

Releasing development ISOs is a good way to test all the functions of the installer with the largest possible scope of use cases and variety of hardware. We still have some issues left with EFI integration and some tricky bugs in the installer. So in order to allow some time to fix them and also to still enjoy the Christmas period with friends and family, it has been decided to delay beta 2 until the 6th of January 2015, the initial date of the RC, and then postpone the final release.

We will communicate on the final release date as soon as beta 2 is released so that we can have a better view of the remaining work to be done.

We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a great year for 2015 and we hope to see you ready on deck to test beta 2 release when it’s out !

(Image source : xkcd)

Posted in release, test | 15 Comments

It’s Christmas in FOSS-land!

Posted on December 17, 2014 by grenoya

largeGComprisLogoOr Hannuka or Kwanzaa or the solstice or… you get the picture. Whatever holiday you celebrate, it’s here!

And in the spirit of warmth and light and giving, Mageia is embarking on (what we hope will be) a yearly tradition where we donate to a project in the FOSS community. “What is this?” you might ask, or even “But I donated to Mageia, not some small project I’ve never even heard of!” and those are, of course, excellent questions.

See, Mageia is a community-driven Linux distribution. Everybody here volunteers and does the work because he or she can and because they want to contribute. The money that we collect in donations goes to paying for server costs, hardware repairs and upgrades, supporting booths and handing out merchandise at conventions (and in one case, flying in a repair person when everything broke).

But the Mageia community is part of a much larger community, the FOSS community (FOSS stands for Free and Open Source Software). Thanks to you (yes, you personally!) we’ve grown to become one of the biggest Linux distributions out there. When we first started we were quite small, but we’ve grown up very quickly. Now we are in a position to help the little guy. We’ll be using this gift to help out a project that we feel close to, so it will always be a project that we package.

This gift is (relatively speaking) rather small, but it’s the thought that counts. So we’d like to take this opportunity to spotlight a small but very useful open source software project.
Almost all of the applications that we use in a Mageia system are developed by other open source projects. Some of these are large and reasonably well funded, such as KDE, Gnome and Mozilla, but there are many others that depend on the support of very small groups of dedicated individuals. One such project is GCompris, which is presently engaged in a fund raising drive to enable it to modernize the appearance of its software.

So we have decided that this year we will be donating 250€ to GCompris. This year’s choice is built on that simple point: as a distribution, we are working hard to make Linux comfy for most users. Many children first see Linux through GCompris (which means “I understood” when pronounced in French).

GCompris is a software suite of educational activities for children from 2 to 10. Helping to introduce children to Linux helps the whole Linux world to grow :). Of course, our donation is only a small part of what GCompris is trying to raise, so if you have some money that you budgeted for a good cause and are looking for that good cause, we think that GCompris is it.

This time we picked GCompris ourselves, but next year, you can have a say in the matter. Towards the end of 2015 (we’re not sure exactly when) we’ll ask you what you think a worthy cause for our yearly gift will be. So if you happen to see one, make a note of it.
May you have a merry end-of-year festivities.

Mageia team

Posted in community, Mageia | 8 Comments