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!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 6 Comments

Calling artwork and design people

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Patricia Fraser

Mageia’s artwork team is swinging into action after the summer break, and we’re looking for anyone with design skills and interest who would like to join us. Is this you?

We’re pulling together the Mageia Look in advance of Mageia 2 release, and we would really appreciate the input, and you can help us make Mageia’s mark on the world!

What does it mean? Revising and updating designs for the Mageia site, for the Wiki and for the special Mageia-ish things about our install; designing plymouth themes and icon sets; working on completing our colour palette, and designing things like posters, banners and other stuff for gatherings and when we have a stand at LinuxTag or wherever. All good fun!

Check out the artwork team on the Wiki, contact the artwork team leader Thorsten van Lil (TeaAge on irc, email on the wiki page); show up at an artwork meeting on irc, or all of the above!

 

Posted in artwork, team | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

A Mageia Rant

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Patricia Fraser

Just one little rant from a new Mageia user – we get quite a few of these, so you could think of it as a representative sample:

My new Thinkpad came Friday morning: A T520, quad Core i7, 8GB RAM, 15.6 inch screen, built in WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, etc..

After burning 4 DVDs to create a boot and restore disks for the Win7 Pro and
other software that came pre-installed, I shrank the main Windows partition down,
leaving a couple hundred GB of free space for a Linux install.

I decided it was finally time to give Mageia 1 a try. I burnt a DVD from the x64
iso and proceeded to install. I chose Gnome over KDE, this time, because of the
modestly smaller footprint. (I’m comfortable with both)

With no CLI tweaking at all, I got everything to work… and I mean everything.

Sound and video worked immediately. WiFi worked once I was online and the system
could fetch the correct driver. (No NDISwrapper wanted nor needed here)

All of the special buttons work. The WiFi toggle button, the volume buttons, mute
button, sleep mode button. I fired up Firefox and browsed using WiFi to my music
server. Selecting an album to play, I found that the buttons to pause, skip
tracks forwards and backwards, and stop, all worked correctly with the default
movie player.

Making the Bluetooth mouse work required merely using Gnome’s Bluetooth config
tool and pairing the devices. Poof! The mouse was working too. No hand editing of
Xorg.conf!

CPU speed-stepping works. Sleep mode kicks in if I either close the lid or press
the sleep button, and comes back up correctly later. Pressing the lock button
locks the screen, causing the usual login prompt to appear. Scrolling works in
both axis if I slide my finger along the edge of the track pad.

I’ve done a lot of Linux installs, but I’ve never seen this much hardware work
right-out-of-the-box on any machine, let alone a laptop. The Win7 side couldn’t
see the Bluetooth mouse without the driver CD, but Mageia 1 had it covered. Amazing.

Tis truly a sweet machine with a very sweet Linux install.

Long Live Urpmi!

Posted in users | 17 Comments

Mageia 2: release cycle, support and planning

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

We’ve had discussions in the Mageia community, to decide about the Release cycle of future versions of Mageia. We started with some proposals and everybody was able to comment and discuss.

The outcome of our discussions: the release cycle for Mageia will be 9 months. We think it’s a well-balanced choice, providing an up-to-date distribution that’s also stable. It should also give us enough time to build the specifications,  develop, package, innovate and finalize it.

Each Mageia release will be supported for 18 months. We will have a global review of our resources before next release to check that we can still provide support according to our first plan. If all is going well, then we will think about releasing a LTS (Long Term Support) version every 18 months, to be supported for 3 years.

Development planning for Mageia 2 has tried to take into account all the comments coming from our Mageia 1 post-mortem. Here’s the timeline:

  • Alpha 1 : 16/11/2011
  • Alpha 2 : 14/12/2011
  • Beta 1 : 20/01/2012
  • Versions freeze : 06/02/2012
  • Artwork freeze: 10/02/2012
  • i18n freeze: 10/02/2012
  • Beta 2 : 14/02/2012
  • Releases freeze : 06/03/2012
  • RC : 09/03/2012
  • Final Release: 04/04/2012

Work has started already – you can have a first look at the technical specifications.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 27 Comments