Mageia at JDLL 2011

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Patricia Fraser

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

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Patricia Fraser

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

Mageia 2 Alpha 1 – ready for testing!

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Patricia Fraser

We’re all excited today! We’re at the first milestone on our way to Mageia 2 – Alpha 1 ISOs are ready for download.

Now it’s time for everyone to test, test, test and report bugs – so that Mageia 2 will be in great shape for release in May. You will find more info on our freshly migrated wiki:

Enjoy!

Posted in alpha, QA, release, test, users | 29 Comments

First alpha ISOs for Mageia 2 due on the 25th of November

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

Initially planned for the 16th of November, our first alpha ISOs for Mageia 2 are postponed to the 25th of November.

They are currently being tested and polished before being released to you all, and we need a few days to do it right. Especially considering that one of the main people working at the production of ISOs is kept busy due to (happy) personal events. 🙂

Be ready to test!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

FrOSCon and OpenRheinRuhr: Mageia on tour

Posted on November 16, 2011 by obgr_seneca

Alien and obgr_seneca

For six years now, the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg is inviting to the Free and Open Source Software Conference (short FrOSCon) in August.

Together with the German user community MandrivaUser.de Mageia was present there with a stand and a project room where several talks were done (and where we had the possibility to sleep).
FrOSCon is not really targeting a public audience but is more some kind of family meeting of the German Open Source community as a whole.

So the main point of interest are the talks about a large bandwidth of Open Source topics. The project stands are more used as meeting points for people of different projects to talk to each other.

As every year the social event, a barbecue in the atrium of the University was used to keep social contacts with other projects alive and get to know new people.

 

Another event in the German OpenSource calendar is the OpenRheinRuhr in November. For the third time now this event took place in the so called “Ruhrpott” in the northwest of Germany.

Mageia was (again) sharing a booth with the German Mandriva user community MandrivaUser.de.

Mageia booth at the ORR

Wobo, Teddy and Alf

And different from the FrOSCon the OpenRheinRuhr is targeting the public audience, so we had quite some visitors at our booth, people already using Mageia as well as people asking for more information about the project and the distribution.

And of course we took the chance to talk to other OpenSource people about various topics.

If you are interested in more pictures, have a look here.

Posted in events, Mageia, users | 5 Comments