After some discussions in a Mageia council meeting, it has been decided to give some more time to the lead-up to the Mageia 3 final release, so we can have more tests, more bug fixes – and a more stable and up-to-date Mageia 3.
So, we will add one more beta release, and push release day along a little bit:
Make sure you download the beta releases and the RC, and help us test, test, test!
When you discover a new distro, you can explore the different menus and tools and find out what is familiar and what is new to you. But you also need some more detailed explanations of the different features which are available. Mageia’s documentation team is responsible for creating and maintaining the documentation to enable you to explore Mageia in more depth and we’d like to tell you about what we do and how you can get involved. There’s always plenty to do and every contribution, however small, is very welcome. Come and enjoy being part of an international team sharing our knowledge and love of Mageia. You’ll probably be surprised at how much you learn yourself!
As well as supervising the wiki, we’re also preparing official help pages for the installer and the Mageia Control Center, using DocBook XML and XSL. These official help pages will also be accessible inline from the help menus. They have had to be written from scratch, as we weren’t able to simply adapt the official Mandriva documentation for licensing reasons, so it’s a big job.
We need not only writers for the wiki and the official inline and online help pages but also translators, proofreaders for various languages and testers who work through the pages and make sure that the instructions are clear, correct and complete. There’s no minimum commitment needed – team members do what they can, when they can. We’d like to have some more contributors who are familiar with wiki or DocBook formatting, but this isn’t essential. If you can write some basic text or produce screenshots for a page, someone else can produce the final formatted version. Most of our pages have been put together by more than one person – it’s teamwork that gets the job done and no contribution is too small.
We also need people who use less common hardware or peripherals, such as graphics tablets, UPS, satellite connection, hard disks bigger than 2.5TB (GPT) etc, to help us produce instructions on setting them up and using them with Mageia.
If you’re interested in helping us, you can just get started writing or editing wiki pages – you don’t have to be a team member to do that and you can let us know about your contribution on our IRC channel #mageia-doc. If you’d like to join the team officially, just follow the links in the wiki to add yourself to the list of team members, then sign up to our mailing list and send us an e-mail to introduce yourself. We look forward to hearing from you!
We are reaching the final run for Mageia 3 release: beta 2 isos are available for tests. This was a real release full of server failures and bugs :). Still, the QA team did a fantastic work as usual.
We will need your feedback on the Broadcom wireless chipset. We intentionally removed all proprietary drivers for it. So it comes configured using only the free one. This is a test to check support by the free drivers. If in some way we get too many failures, we will revert it for the hardware that still needs the proprietary driver.
This release comes also with the brand new vesion of LibreOffice, the 4.0.0 RC2 version.
More information on this release:
The time is now getting short before the final release. Your tests are essential to make Mageia even more reliable and usable. So we will get many more nice reviews.
Enjoy!
Being later than planned is becoming quite a tradition with Mageia3!
Due to some unforeseen problems with the build server and a nasty kernel bug affecting USB support, beta 2 development release is also a bit delayed. All being well though, it should be available in the next few days.
Stay tuned!
As with previous years, Mageia will be at FOSDEM 2013. We will have a booth in building K, first floor. If you are around let’s meet and speak about our favorite distribution!
We will speak about coming Mageia 3 release, but also ARM port, community… Some goodies will also be available (stickers, tee-shirts).
You can find more details on Mageia wiki.
FOSDEM is also the place for the annual general assembly of the Mageia.Org association.
Finally join us for the Mageia dinner. Please register on the wiki so that we can plan it properly.
