Happy New Mageia Year!

Welcome back from the holidays! It seems like we’re all refreshed, we all had a great time and we’re all ready to dive into 2012 and make Mageia even better.

First up on the events calendar is FOSDEM.

FOSDEM is the Free and Open Source Developers’ European Meeting. It’s a 2-day conference held in Brussels, Belgium, and it’s to promote the widespread use of Free and Open Source software. Held every February for more than 10 years, it’s a major event for the free software enthusiast in Europe. Check out our FOSDEM planning page for 2012 here.

We were there last year for the first time as Mageia. Here’s our report.
This year we’ll be a little bit more visible at FOSDEM, because we’ve grown, so we hope it’s a bit easier to find us:

On the Mageia stand

Like last year, we have been granted a stand in the section dedicated to community projects, alongside other distributions such as Opensuse, Fedora, or projects like GNOME and KDE.

We will be there to answer to questions, present the project, showcase the new alpha 3 ISO, give away Live Mageia 1 CDS and to have a friendly chat with everybody who would like to share with us. Please do come and say hello if you have the occasion, between talks.

If you’re a Mageia person, we’d love to have your help – come and hand out CDs, tell people how you use Mageia, talk to other packagers and developers, or just get a picture taken with your favorite Mageia contributors!

Mageia-related talks

And again, like last year, we’re doing our part with the talks and sessions.

Our contributor Misc (Michael Scherer) will do a talk about the distribution, more precisely about the unified login setup that was set up by sysadmins. He will also participate in a round table about the subject of system administration of Linux distribution projects, to share and discuss ideas.

Several other talks are planned, like a cross distribution talk about local team, and there’s a proposal for a session called “Cross distro problem solving” that we might be part of. We’ll update the FOSDEM page on the wiki as we get more info.

Mageia General Assembly

Each year Mageia must hold a General Assembly, to elect replacement board members, give a financial report and do some other reporting, and to conduct other business as required.

We’ll be announcing the place, day and time of the Assembly once it’s fixed, as well as announcing the final agenda and the process for nominations and voting.

The Saturday Dinner at FOSDEM

We’re starting to put our names down on the list to have dinner on Saturday night. The list is on the wiki page – come join us!

How you can help at FOSDEM

  • Log into the wiki and go to the FOSDEM planning page.
  • Put your name down to help on the stand and contact the stand organiser – details are on the wiki page.

Come and join the fun!

Posted in events, Mageia | 10 Comments

Server outage

From sysadmin team

Update 2011/12/29 00:30 UTC: Main server is now back and we have fixed everything.

Update 2011/12/20 15:30 UTC: Mageia website has been migrated to an other server. Mailing lists are still offline. We are still working on it.

Last night, around 00:40 CET, the main server of zarb.org, which still hosts some of the mageia services, suffered from serious I/O problems on the boot volume of the raid array. One of the admins decided to reboot it hoping this could solve the problem, but the server was not able to start up and the various remote control systems (serial cable, admin card) are not sufficient to solve this problem. Zarb.org admins have contacted Lost Oasis (who offers hosting to Mageia.Org and Zarb.org) to find a solution. Since the servers are in south of France, few people of the team can access it without a long travel.

We have no ETA to give for now. The known impacted services are:

  • some of the mailing lists (at least mageia-dev, mageia-discuss and some others)
  • the main website (www.mageia.org)
  • the old wiki (new one on wiki.mageia.org is fine).

The build system as well as all other websites are working fine. All data is safe on a backup on another server, but without physical access and spare drives we cannot do much for the server.

Feel free to ask on IRC (#mageia or #mageia-dev on irc.freenode.net) if you have any questions. We will update this post as soon as we have more information.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Next step – Alpha 2 is ready to test

Here’s the next milestone on the way to Mageia 2 – Alpha 2 ISOs are ready for download.

More than ever we need you to test, test, test and report bugs.

Check the wiki links for:

Thanks to everyone for their hard work on Alpha 1. Please do it again for Alpha 2!

Note: Accidentally, x86_64 DVD ISOs were uploaded yesterday, that didn’t even boot. Please redownload the new ISOs, if you already downloaded those. There’s been an update to the Errata to help those folks who were caught by this.

 

Posted in alpha, Mageia, QA, test | Tagged , , , , | 18 Comments

Mageia at JDLL 2011

The JDLL took place in Lyon, France on the 18th and 19th of November. Mageia was there.


The JDLL (« Journées du logiciel libre », i.e. “Free Software Days”) are an annual event organised in Lyon by ALDIL (a Lyon-based association promoting the development of free computing): talks, workshops and business and association booths.

Some contributors were there to represent Mageia at our distribution’s booth:

  • Adrien Gallou (agallou)
  • Rémi Verschelde (Akien)
  • Samuel Verschelde (Stormi)

There were also other members of the community, especially Michaël Scherer (misc) on the JabberFr.org booth, and Daniel Tartavel (who helped us with logistics assistance) on the booth of LibrePC. [1]

To help us break the ice with the visitors, we displayed these lines on our demonstration screen:
Mageia screenshot with information
We wanted to give out free installation CDs (and some DVDs) to the visitors interested in Mageia, to encourage its spreading. We made some with our own stuff, since there are no official materials for Mageia yet.

The CDs given out the first day, burned and designed by Adrien:

Mageia CD

The CDs which were distributed the second day, provided by Daniel:

Mageia CD

Visitors were quite diverse, ranging from neophytes with no knowledge of Linux to advanced users asking for support on a specific subject.

A local mailing list project was conceived during these two days, dedicated to Mageia users from Lyon and its surroundings. The list aims to ease the process of organising install parties and RPM workshops, and also to enable us to support each other. Some users who were interested in it have already given us their emails so that we can notify them if the project becomes a reality.

Finally, these two days enabled us to spread the word about Mageia and to show it as a major distribution (one of the 4 distributions which were represented, along with Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu), to meet more people from the free software community of Lyon and its surroundings, and to have a good time.

[1] LibrePC is Daniel’s shop in Lyon specialising in Linux and free software.

Posted in events, Mageia, team | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Looking better and better

Mageia 1 looks quite amazingly handsome, doesn’t it?

Looking back, what we achieved is impressive, especially when you consider the size of the artwork team and how new something like this was to us. It was a bit of a mad scramble to get it all done in time – and somehow we made it, even though there were only a few of us.

Thanks go out to all of the people who helped with Mageia 1. It was very much appreciated – and hopefully will be again soon!

Now we’re a real team, thanks in large part to our leader TeaAge; we have a good structure, and we’re properly up and running.

With Mageia 1 out in the wild, it’s time to turn our attention to Mageia 2. Using what we’ve learned and our new expertise, we aim to make Mageia 2 very pretty indeed.

Our call now is to anyone and everyone who has anything to contribute: please get involved!

No matter whether you have finished artwork, a vague idea, a basic sketch… please share it, so we can all look at each others’ work, finish what needs finishing and build it into Mageia 2. We’re gathering ideas as much as we’re getting the final pieces done, so if your work is still in progress, post it and tell us where you see it going.

We need: wallpapers, icon sets, themes, colour schemes or just your lovely constructive criticism.

What to do and where to go to help:

There’s now a group on flickr where you can post your work.

There’ s a thread on the Mageia Forum.

Check the Mageia wiki for some useful info.

And last but not least, the licensing info can be found here.

We look forward to seeing your work and your ideas.

PS: If you don’t want to sign up to flickr, you can either post links to your artwork in the forum thread (see the link above), or send links to the artwork mailing list.

The Mageia Artwork team

Posted in artwork, Mageia, team | Tagged | 7 Comments