Million Dollar Baby…

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

…or at least almost € 15 000 ($ 20 174) since September 18th of 2010!
From this huge donations, it remains € 9 676.31 after having bought Tee-Shirts, hardware for build nodes, flyers for events, stickers, trips to Marseille or Brussel.

Since the begining of the Mageia adventure, 243 people gave money to Mageia.Org, helping us to buy hardware, domain names, goodies, …
It makes an average donation of € 62 ($ 83) per donor! Thank you to all the money donors or ressources partners (ielo, gandi, online) but also to all other people offering in the way they want: time (packagers, triage, qa, artwork, marketing, bug report, dev…) or just by spreading Mageia arround them by buying TS or talking on forums, events…

For now, you can follow how are used the funds received by reading the report section of our website. Here is a small summup of the 2011 financial report:

Mageia.Org - way of donation

Mageia.Org - way of donations

Mageia.Org donations: 2010 versus 2011

Mageia.Org donations: 2010 versus 2011

We clearly see a significant drop in donations (which remain high). Do you have comments explaining the drop in donations or a brake to them? I think it’s just a lack of spending your donations or asking you for dedicated donations. As explained below, there are big expenses planned soon.

Our next big expense (around € 7 000) will be for our annual upgrade and maintenance of our infrastructure with a trip to Marseille (to ielo data-center) to rack:

  • fiona, our backup server (~ € 2 000 for fiona + HDD (only if we have to buy a server. Perhaps we will have a gift and so will just have to buy HDD)) ;
  • a ARM build system for our ARM port made by rtp (~ € 500 for HDD, power supply, SoC));
  • updating HDD of our build nodes (~ € 1 200) ;
  • adding a new server for offering packagers and QA a way to build package for test or to run VMs (~ € 2 800).
  • + ~ € 500 for train, car and hotel for 2 or 3 people.

This is a non-exhaustive list! So we can spend a few more if we encounter a few issues. I will keep you in touch of expenses for this need in an other blog post.
If you want to give money or hardware for this upgrade of our build system, you can add a comment when making a donation, comment on this blog post, send a mail to the sysadmin ML or contact me (careful to fix the mail address…).

Moreover, before the end of November:

  • the financial report page will be updated to offer you a better way to give us money. Indeed, you will be able to see a graduated scale with colors (red, orange, green) to have a quick status of our financial health. As a lot of people would rather give money for a decicated cause, you will also soon be able to see our forecast with a easy way to choose the line you would like to donate (all the need or just a part of it) for ;
  • the donate page will be updated too to offer you a faster “donate button” and a way to make monthly transfer ;
  • a goodies shop will be started to let you buy stuff to spread Mageia and support Mageia.Org.

I will write a new blog post before the end of November to tell you more about these new features. Meanwhile, thank you all for your donations coming to support us and help us move forward together and still faster!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

They make Mageia: Samuel Verschelde

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

 From Marcello Anni, Mageia Italia

Hi Samuel, welcome by Mageia italian users. First of all, could you please start by introducing yourself?

Hello. I’m Samuel Verschelde, 29 year-old, living in Lyon (France).

How did you first become interested in Linux?

I discovered linux during my studies, in 2003. It was exciting to discover a whole new world I didn’t know, having only used computers with Microsoft systems on them for many years. The first distribution I installed was Debian potatoe, and it probably wasn’t the best choice for a beginner not familiar with unix command line 🙂
Then I used Red Hat for some time and finally settled to Mandrake in 2004.

How did you discover Mageia and why did you decide to join the project?

I heard about Mageia the day it was announced publicly and immediately decided to join the project. Saving the linux distribution I liked by turning it into a community-driven project was (and still is) very motivating. Also, most of the names I knew among contributers were joining Mageia, so it was clear that even if it survived, Mandriva (the distribution) would never be the same again.

What are the fields you are contributing in Mageia?

I’m mostly interested in supporting the stable releases of Mageia. In the end, those are what people use. For that I joined several teams :

  • packager team, to be able to fix bugs, push new versions or add new software to the distribution. Soon, it will allow me to push backports (ie new versions of popular software) for Mageia 1, provided I find enough testers to validate them.
  • QA team: its work currently is mostly testing update candidates (bug fixes, security fixes) before they are pushed to all users. I didn’t plan to work that much for the QA team, but there appeared to be a real need so I invested time into that, trying to gather new volunteers and to help organizing the team’s work.

Also, I’m “mentoring” 4 people who want to become packagers for Mageia. I wasn’t sure I had enough experience in packaging to do it, but here again there was a need (people having been waiting for a mentor for weeks) so I volunteered. It appears to go well, and in case of doubt I can still ask for advice to more experienced packagers.

And of course there is the Mageia App Db project that we started some months ago.

In fact, you are the maintainer of Mageia-app-db. Can you explain what it is and which are its goals?

Mageia App Db is an online RPM database whose goals are :

  • provide an “official” place where to look for information about the packages in Mageia
  • focus on interaction between users, testers and packagers: from users to packagers (backport requests, new soft requests with a voting system, …), from packagers to users/testers (testing requests, ie packagers asking users to test a certain package before pushing it to the official repositories, …)
  • easy to use yet powerful
  • some features, planned or already implemented : e-mail notifications (when a new package is available for example), screenshots, ratings, tags…

For the complete list, see the web page for this project.

In which development status is mageia-app-db? what are its major features and what we should expect in the next releases?

The development status is : “being actively developed, but already usable in its current state if you can forgive the missing features”. If we count only the most regular contributers, there are 3 developers: Adrien Gallou (France), Vyacheslav Blinov (Russia) and myself.

Currently version 0.2 has the following features :

  • it synchronizes with Olivier Thauvin’s multi-distributions RPM database, Sophie, so that it’s always up to date
  • allows to browse the list, search for packages, see screenshots (when available), see the latest updates or backports, and use various filters
  • Thanks to Sophie, it can work not only for Mageia, but also for Mandriva, Fedora, OpenSuse and other RPM-based distributions.

Demo is available here.

The current state is still rough, but it’s already useful, at least to me (and my brother Rémi confirmed he uses it too 😉 ) !

Version 0.3 should bring the following features :

  • official installation of Mageia App Db on Mageia servers (not really a feature per se, but still an important step)
  • LDAP connectivity to Mageia’s user database, so that your login in mageia websites will work also in Mageia App Db
  • user notifications. You can choose to receive an e-mail when a given package is updated, for example when a new version of virtualbox becomes available in the backports media.
  • internationalization of the user interface, but first with very few languages. Note that I’m talking only about the user interface. Translation of package descriptions is another bigger matter.
  • various small improvements

Thank you Samuel for giving us this interview and keep it up with this great work! See you soon!

Thank you for asking me, greetings to all the Mageia users!

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

They make Mageia: Oliver Burger

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

Tell us all about you!

Who am I? That’s quite a question. But let me try… My name is Oliver Burger (aka obgr_seneca) and I live in southwest Germany. At the moment I’m doing something called dual studying here. It means that about half the year I am at a University and the other half I’m at a company, developing mainly web based geographical information systems but other web applications aas well.

How/where do you contribute to Mageia? What else do you contribute to? Why?

I am an active member of the German Mandriva community MandrivaUser.de, I was a Mandriva translator since about 2007 and I was one of the packagers creating the mud third party packages.
Since MandrivaUser.de had its differences with Mandriva S.A. for quite some time, Mageia was the best thing that could have happened. “Our” distribution living on without the influence of a strange company we had to live with…
At Mageia I am team leader of the i18n team. In addition I am in web team and packaging team.
As i18n team leader it’s my job to see the team has everything it needs to do its job. This means keeping in touch with the sysadmins and other teams as well as keeping the team running and cooperating as a team. In addition I am doing my share in the translations as every other i18n team member does.
Being team leader doesn’t mean I could impose decisions upon the team, it’s more
like moderating the team, finding solutions all or most of the team can agree upon and of course I am the team’s representative in the council and thus I have to see to it, the team’s opinions and needs are heard by other parts of the project.
In web team I am still more passive, I did some parts of the web sites for the Mageia 1 release and I have some plans about what I’d like to add to the Mageia web world, but I didn’t find the time to really implement them.
As a packager I am building and maintaining some smaller packages and I’m helping in the mentoring process.

So, what’s special about i18n in Mageia? What are the main points at the moment to be done? What are the difficulties?

I think special is the team building process. In all the years as a Mandriva translator, I never really worked together with translators from other parts of the world. At Mageia I see i18n as being a part of the community, working together with all the other teams. At Mandriva it was more being an unpayed underappreciated employe…

Anything what would you love to see added/happening in Mageia? 

To be honest, what I would really love to see in Mageia is loads of contributors in all the areas, so Mageia can be the best distribution out there!
So if you feel, you have any skills that are helpfull to Mageia, don’t be shy.
And let me add, that we are always welcoming new translators, there are quite some languages, that are translated by single person teams and quite some more we don’t have translators till now.So, come aboard!

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

It’s our birthday!

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

Today, the Mageia project turns 1 – a proud, promising and exciting toddler!

We’re here because of you – and all of us continue to join in the fun of making Mageia a reality.

Let’s have a quick look back:

  • September 18th 2010 was the day it all began
  • and there was an amazing reception!
  • from September to November, we started setting up the infrastructure, gathering people, discussing important bits (basic governance, policies, where to start).
  • in January 2011, our factory was ready and we started importing, building packages into it and released our first alpha.
  • for the following 6 months, we all worked our asses off to release test images, fix bugs, square the design and have something we could release.
  • in June, Mageia 1 was there and largely welcome by the community as a stable, nice, working distribution.
  • during the Summer, we took the time to step back a bit, to discuss things to work on for the next release (links to specs, points) and the project’s life, for teams to organize themselves better after the first round –
  • and today, we’re starting our second year, right on track!

Some of the highlights as we worked our way to here:

So let’s celebrate this!  on September 18th and 19th (Sunday and Monday):

  • check this tag out: #mageiabirthday1
  • come by #mageia on Freenode IRC and say hi! we’ll be there from12:00 UTC on Sunday 18th through 12:00 UTC on Monday 19th.
  • post something anywhere with the #mageiabirthday1 tag (twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube…) and send us the links!
  • party! and post your pictures and send us links;
  • tell us what this means to you!
Posted in Mageia | 15 Comments

A bug’s life

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

From Mageia’s QA and triage teams

In an ideal world, software bugs get fixed shortly after they are discovered. (Actually, in a really ideal world, there would be no bugs to begin with, but let’s be a bit realistic). You might be led to believe that once a bug has been reported the Mageia packagers will fix the bug, issue a new package, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Unfortunately, for most of the bugs discovered, things are not quite as simple as that. Many things have to happen and be done outside the view of most casual observers before a bug can be considered fixed.

The triage team is the link between the user encountering a bug and the packagers and developers who come up with a resolution for the bug. All new issues being reported should be classified and prioritized and checked for duplications with existing bug reports; if necessary, it has to be checked whether the problem can be reproduced; clarifications are asked for where they’re needed and so on. Once all this is done, the bug can be linked to the proper package and assigned to the maintainer of that package for resolution.

Without a triage team, bugs get duplicated, grow stale, and are left unnoticed with the packagers unaware of their existence, and you as the end user unhappy with the quality of Mageia as a distribution. Things will not break overnight if left untreated, but just like termites eating away at the foundation of your house, you want something to be done about them before things get out of hand!

For bugfixes that apply to the officially released and supported version of Mageia, just pushing the new package isn’t enough. What we’d hate to do is to make things worse rather than better and have our users run into even bigger problems. So, before an update is released, it has to go through the QA (Quality Assurance) team who will test the package on all supported architectures, ensure it runs, ensure there are no noticeable regressions, and that the update actually fixes the original problem mentioned in the bugreport.

These tasks of triaging and QA-testing are some of the least glamorous, but on the other hand some of the most important responsibilities within a project like Mageia. It probably will not bring you (or anyone else) lasting fame, fortune or love, but you will have the opportunity to help make Mageia, a distribution you might be using, even greater than it is today. The good thing is that triaging and QA-testing does not require any sophisticated technical skills, nor does it require any hard commitments; anyone willing to help can help and all you need to participate is some time to spare!

These two teams can both use your help in order to see bugs get triaged better and more efficiently and updates are tested more thoroughly than we can currently do it, as we are short of volunteer hands. Interested? Please feel free to jump in and get started!

For the triage team:

  • Add your name to our wiki page
  • Subscribe to the bugsquad team mailing list at  (and feel free to drop us a line on there!)
  • Subscribe to the bugs list  (Please note, this is a very high volume list, if you are not prepared to deal with this, consider using the bugzilla interface and add yourself to the Cc of any bugs you are interested in).
  • Read the guide to triaging at  as well as our bug policy
  • Get to work!
  • Come socialise with us in #mageia-bugsquad on IRC or ask questions there.

For QA-team:

  • Add your name to our wiki page
  • Subscribe to the qa-discuss (QA team discussion) and qa-bugs (bugzilla notifications for update candidates assigned to QA team) mailing lists 
  • Read the Mageia updates policy  and the QA specific guide
  • You might also like to join us on IRC in #mageia-qa on irc.freenode.net – It’s a good place to get a quick answer to any questions you might have.
  • Get stuck in, there is always plenty to do!
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