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.

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Mageia at LSM 2011

Posted on July 8, 2011 by Anne Nicolas
Strasbourg by night

CC-BY-SA Some rights reserved by .tungl

The Libre Software Meeting, now in its 12th year, is an annual French gathering of Free Software enthusiasts. Over 4 or 5 days it features several conferences and discussions about a wide range of topics, as seen on the schedule. LSM changes location each year; this year’s event is in Strasbourg in the east of France from the 9th to the 14th of July, and Mageia people will be speaking about our project.

Anne will be speaking at the “Forker et construire en 10 leçons” session on Tuesday morning, in the “Community” track about the project as a whole, basing her presentation on the one she did for LinuxTag. She’ll be talking about what we’ve learned during Mageia’s first year, and sharing our discoveries with our fellow community members.

Our second presentation, by yours truly, will be in the afternoon in the “System Administration” track; this one is about the inner workings and gory details of the infrastructure of a Linux distribution. I’ll be offering a unique view under the hood of the
project, talking about the way we tried to create a sustainable and transparent team of volunteers.

Both talks will be in French.

Any self-respecting Free Software event would be incomplete without an association village. LSM’s attractiveness also comes from the variety of booths; they range from the usual Free systems and software such as Debian, GNOME, etc to associative ISPs like FDN, regional LUGs and others – see here for the complete list.

We will be present to show Mageia to visitors – and to discuss it all with passers-by, Mageia users and other community members. Some of us have been here before under other  names in previous years, so we’re well prepared!

Since one of our core values is co-operation with others’ projects, we have decided to share our booth with the French Fedora Ambassadors and the members of the French OpenSUSE community, to share the logistics of taking care of a booth. For example, this will let everyone go to eat with the assurance that someone is watching over our stuff, or to use one car instead of duplicating our efforts.

We’d really like to see you there – LSM is a great conference with something for everyone, and we’d love it if you come to our presentations, and drop by our booth to chat with Mageia people.

See you at LSM!

Posted in events | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

They make Mageia: Jérôme Quelin

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

Now that things are well on their way and that Mageia 1 is there, it’s time to discover some more about the persons that are making this a reality.

Today, this is about Jérôme; thanks to him for being the first!

Jérôme presents POE

CC By-NC-SA, Some rights reserved by @rgs

 

Who are you? Where do you live? What do you do for a living?

I am Jérôme Quelin (aka jq), 34 years old. I am married and a father of a little boy. We are living in Lyon, France, where I’m working at Renault Trucks.

How/where do you contribute to Mageia? what else do you contribute to, and why?

I am the maintainer of Mageia’s Perl stack. This consists of Perl itself, and of all the CPAN modules available within Mageia.

Note: Perl is a high-level programming language in which applications and systems can be written; a lot of Mageia relies on this.

I am also a Perl developer, owning a few modules on CPAN and contributing to some others.

So, what’s special about Perl in Mageia? what can one do with it? what’s available?

Perl has nothing fancy on Mageia, it’s usually the latest one which is available (note: Mageia 1 ships with Perl 5.12.3 since 5.14.0 was too late in our release cycle).

But Mageia shines on the number of CPAN modules available at the tip of your fingers: around 2,500 distributions, accounting for ~17,000 modules. That’s a little bit less than 20% of CPAN, but that’s quite huge! I don’t know what the other distributions are shipping, but I think it’s a lot less.

All the latest & greatest modules are in: Moose, POE, Dancer, Catalyst, Dist-Zilla, etc. – you name it.

All those modules are of course updated on a regular basis, integrated with the system libraries… and sometimes even fixed to make them compile (patches & bug reports of course sent upstream).

Mageia also has a great tool to maintain the cpan modules up to date: magpie. It shouldn’t be too hard to add support for other distributions, if you’re interested.

For instance, to install a given Perl module, just do:

$ sudo urpmi 'perl(Foo::Bar)'

and if the module is missing, you can open a bug report and we’ll work on packaging it for you.

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