Mageia 8 was released Feb 26th, 2021. Mageia 7 will receive updates up until the 30th of June, including security updates. It is then highly recommended upgrading to Mageia 8 as soon as possible.
As usual, before the upgrade, do a thorough backup of your data and documents.
You have a few ways to install Mageia 8:
Do a clean installation from Classical or Live media. In this case, you will keep the data in your /home if it is in a separate partition, as is usually the case – but do check! The root partition will be formatted during the installation process.
Upgrade from the command line, as described in release notes.
Upgrade through the applet in the system tray.
Enjoy the ride with this newcomer in our community!
With Mageia 8 just released and development for Mageia 9 getting underway in Cauldron, the unstable branch of Mageia, now is a great time to get involved with packaging.
We are starting to look at the features that we want to include for Mageia 9, and as it is so early in the development cycle, now is the time for major developments, or big updates to key pieces of software. This is a great time to join the project as you can propose features you would like to see, help to implement large changes or see how a distribution evolves through development, stabilisation and then is released.
If there is an application that you are interested in, if you want to help maintain part of the distribution, or if you want to learn something new, there are many opportunities to do so with the packaging team. Those who have knowledge of rpm packaging that want to jump straight in might want to skip the next section and head over to the Becoming a Mageia Packager page here on the Mageia wiki.
Packaging a piece of software involves taking the source code from the upstream developer and turning it into something that is easily managed by the end-users of an installed Mageia system. This involves making sure that the package has all of the needed dependencies to both build and run correctly, as well as tuning the configuration of the build and installed software to be optimal for the Mageia ecosystem. This is done by writing a spec file that is used as a recipe to build an installable rpm package.
The layout of the spec file is very logical and can be followed with minimal programming experience. All that’s needed to get to grips with the basics are initiative, enthusiasm, and the will to learn. There is a good breakdown of what’s in a spec file and how it works here.
So, if you want to jump in and get involved, the next step is to make a Mageia account and follow the guide here. It will explain the next steps of getting set up and finding a mentor. There are also mailing lists and IRC channels (#mageia-dev) if you want to ask questions about what is involved.
Considering the complete lack of bugs in urpm and in the RPM package format, which we’ve grown tired of, The Executive Committee has approved the switch to Debian package manager, apt.
We will rebuild Cauldron to adopt the .deb package to have it in place for Mageia 9. We will also adopt the Arch Installer, ditch Mageia Control Centre for raw conf files, and will also suppress urpm, rpm, dnf, pagure, iurt and mock. Infra will be migrated to a fork of Debian build system.
We also will focus on releasing CDE Desktop as the only supported desktop environment. With support for all other desktop environments and window managers like Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, mate, cinnamon, lxqt, lxde, awesome, e17 and fwvm being removed from Mageia.
The Mageia Association met for its Associate General Meeting on the 1st of March with the intention of electing a new Board to govern Mageia, as per the Mageia Constitution. The Board consists of 6 – 12 individuals that oversee the financials and running of the distribution on matters that are above the Mageia Council. The new Board consists of individuals from around the world that have all joined the Mageia project with the hope of creating a unique and successful distribution that continues the legacy of powerful flexibility and ease of use set out at the start of the project. The new Board members are as follows:
Thomas Backlund (tmb)
Jean-Baptiste Biernacki (jybz)
Yves Brungard (papoteur)
Bruno Cornec (bcornec)
Neal Gompa (ngompa)
David W. Hodgins (davidwhodgins)
Nicolas Lécureuil (neoclust)
Aurelien Oudelet (auroud85)
Donald Stewart (schultz)
Jean Michel Varvou (vouf)
Pascal Vilarem (maat)
On top of this, a new executive committee was also elected by the new board, consisting of Chairman, Treasurer, and Secretary. These roles are fulfilled by Nicolas Lécureuil, Pascal Vilarem, and Aurelien Oudelet, respectively.
The board is now discussing how to promote Mageia in the coming year, and how to make the association stronger in the long run.
Everyone at Mageia is very excited to announce the release of Mageia 8. Mageia 8 comes with new exciting features, major updates to your favourite programmes as well as support for recent hardware.
The release is available to download directly, or as a torrent from here. There are classical installer images for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, as well as live DVD’s for 64-bit Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, and 32-bit Xfce. Don’t worry if you prefer another desktop, there is a huge selection available to install once you are online, there is also installation support and a guide for new users.
Upgrades from Mageia 7 are also supported, full details of the upgrade paths are available in the release notes.
Mageia 8 comes with a wide variety of desktops and window managers, lots of software options and tools. Here are the versions of some of the major packages that ship with Mageia 8:
kernel 5.10.16
rpm 4.16.1.2
urpmi 8.125
dnf 4.6.0
Mesa 20.3.4
Plasma 5.20.4
GNOME 3.38
Xfce 4.16
Firefox 78
Chromium 88
LibreOffice 7.0.4.2
The full list of included software can be seen in the Mageia Application Database.
ARM support has continued to develop, with both AArch64 and ARMv7 now having all packages built and being close to primary architectures now. Support for Wi-Fi installation in the classical installer using WPA2 encryption has been added, as well as improved support for newer filesystems allowing installations on F2FS. Support for NILFS, XFS, exFAT and Windows 10 NTFS has been improved to allow for better partition management. The Live installer has also had significant development. Boot times have been greatly reduced with the use of Zstd compression and improved hardware detection and the support for installing updates as a final step of the installation has been added. Zstd compression has also been applied to the rescue mode, allowing for faster startup, support for encrypted LVM/LUKS has also been added. There has also been plenty of work on other parts of the distribution, SSD support has been added to rpm and Zstd metadata compression as well as a reinstall option added to urpmi. Further details on the new features and improvements in Mageia 8 can be found in the release notes.
Image credit xkcd
This release of Mageia would not have happened without the help of our amazing community that gives their time to make everything we do possible. So, a huge hand is due to everyone that helped with packaging, development, testing, and doing QA on all of the packages and ISO’s, as well as to the translators, documentation team, web team, sysadmins, artists, and everyone else that has helped to bring this release together. If this is something that you would like to be involved with, there is lots of information available on how to get involved!
