Our baby is here: Mageia 1

Posted on June 1, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

We are the Mageia community, and today we are happy to tell everyone that our first release, Mageia 1, is out and available for download.

For people who want to cut to the chase, you can see what’s available, choose your version and download it from mageia.org/downloads.

What is different about Mageia?

Mageia is about people – the people who make and the people who use Mageia the Linux distribution. We’re a good community, and we like to include our users in our community; the people who continue to join us make it better still.

Mageia is about technical excellence – we pursue excellence, so Mageia people will have the best computing experience we can make. Whether you’re a programmer or a student, a business user or a system administrator – whatever your use of your computer, we’d like to help you make it a good experience. Try Mageia 1 and see what you think.

Mageia is about quality – our release promises to be as solid and perfect as Mandriva at its best; that’s our heritage.

Mageia is open – we are committed to the Open Source ideal, we are open to new people and new ideas, and we have open governance of our community.

Mageia is International – our community comes from all over the planet to help Mageia “speak” many languages. Mageia’s structure and its anchor in the user community have already produced excellent results.

Mageia is about diversity – Mageia offers and maintains applications for a wide variety of user groups – with applications ranging from game-playing and music-listening to scientific and engineering applications.

Mageia is about equilibrium – we strive to maintain balance between leading-edge developments and the stable computing experience.

Why might you choose Mageia?

Aside from our great distro, you mean? We’re a great community, and we’re getting better all the time. We care for each other, and in doing so, we try for the best user experience. We’d like to welcome you into our community, while making sure your Mageia installation is trouble-free and a joy to use.

What’s different about us? we’re completely community based, with everything that implies. Our organisation is community-driven; no commercial management can dictate the path Mageia will take; you as a Mageia user can have more say in the future of this distribution than anywhere else.

Standing on the shoulders of Giants

Our team of developers, packagers, contributors, translators, sysadmins and testers have all worked super-hard to bring Mageia 1 to readiness on time.

And we’re all gratefully aware of the amazing work of people at Mandriva, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, the Linux kernel team, the FSF and all the many, many people writing free software – thanks to you all for inspiring us and making the great software that forms the foundation of Mageia.

We want to carry that further into the future and make Mageia the best we possibly can.

What is Mageia?

Mageia is both a community and a Linux distribution. Find out more at:

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Power outage on Mageia servers

Posted on May 28, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

From Misc and sysadmin team

UPDATE: Servers are now back to life and testers back to final isos!

As some people may have seen, we suffered from a severe power outage yesterday, around 00h05 CET time in one of our hosting datacenter.

It seems that an electrical problem stopped some servers at the Lost Oasis server room in Marseille, with the net effect of stopping 4 servers (valstar, alamut, jonund and ecosse as well as the virtual machine running on alamut aka friteuse_tmp). It also impacted all servers of zarb.org that still provides support for some services (like www, mailing-list, secondary DNS, SMTP, etc.).

Perenoel, one of the great Lost Oasis guys, went to the building during the night to take care of the issue and so the servers got power again around 00:20 CEST time. Lost Oasis people worked until 4 o’clock in the morning to fix all servers.

Now all but 2 servers, Valstar and Jonund, are back online.

Jonund is just a build node, we have another one and we are in freeze, so we can cope with the failure without much trouble.

Valstar is the main SVN and LDAP server, so almost everything depend on it. Impacted services:

  • LDAP

– Identity, no access ( no account creation )
– forum, bugzilla, transifex : mostly read only access, no one can log in, but currently logged in people are still ok
– most @mageia.org aliases ( emails are still in queue on zarb )
– shell access ( rabbit, champagne )
– some Sympa lists ( @ml.mageia.org ), mostly board one

  • SVN
  • buildsystem ( no scheduler, no mirror for builders )
  • automated administration of all servers ( no puppetmaster )

The rest ( website, blog, xymon, mailling list, svnweb ) should be ok. We are still looking into it. Lost Oasis told us they would go look at our server in the afternoon, we will keep you informed of the changes with a mail on our list.

Sysadmins will also be looking at making the infrastructure more resilient to such problems (for example, a 2nd LDAP would have solved most issues, and this is already planned ).

If you have any questions please ask on the sysadmin mailing list or on the #mageia-sysadm IRC channel on Freenode , where we will be happy to answer you.

Update (13:10 CEST): all systems are back, up and operational now. \o/

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Last few days before Mageia 1: some news from the front

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

As you may have seen on packaging activity board, package updates rate has slowed down these last few days. Our Mageia 1 official release is in progress and here are the latest news from the Mageia teams working to make this release a success. As always, the very last pre-release days are the toughest ones! 🙂

Packagers’ team

Last run, but not the least, before the official release. Some stuff are still in the TODO list: http://mageia.org/wiki/doku.php?id=iso1:countdown#technical_countdown

Package submission is now closed. Any bug fixes, unless they are release_blockers, are now postponed until after the release, and will be pushed through updates, provided by our security team, after Mageia 1 is out.  Packagers will still be able to add new packages in Mageia 1 after release, using the backports repositories.

The team is now working on the release notes to be ready and translated for launch day.

Final ISO tests are in progress with an experienced group of testers to be able to manage that process properly. First builds started yesterday and the ISOs should be delivered before 31st of May in the evening so that they can be distributed on time.

Shortly after the release, cauldron will be reopened to let people start working on the next release. Some time may however be needed for sysadmins to prepare this switch. We will also restart earlier postponed discussions about important details such as the release cycle.

i18n team

Team is busy now together with marketing and communication people. Main goal is to propose as many languages as possible for Mageia launch so that everybody can easily start learning about and using it.

Sysadmin team

Sysadmin team are focusing on organizing current freeze of distribution but also on what will happen when Mageia 1 is out:

  • preparing mirrors and synchronization of new trees and ISOs for Mageia 1
  • forking our svn so that we can manage both cauldron and Mageia 1 branches
  • preparing security team work environment
  • and… the huge pending TODO list!

Artwork team

Last pieces of artwork have just been integrated for final ISOs. The team will now focus on general design for Mageia 1 launch, e.g. the web site and goodies.

Marketing / communication team

The team is working on last pieces for the Mageia 1 official launch:

  • official announcement and press release
  • make first experience of Mageia easy and user-friendly: downloads, installation, upgrade from Mandriva Linux 2010.1
  • explain what Mageia is and what we plan to do in the next weeks

 

So finally we still have some very busy days until the 1st of June. Need a rest? Go get a hug!

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Final release approaching now: RC available for last tests

Posted on May 17, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

Here it is! This is the last development release before the first stable version of Mageia. Again we are in time, thanks to the hard work of all the community.

You can choose and download your favourite edition. This release is mainly about bug fixes and translation updates. Live CDs should be available in the coming days.

Time is short now but still you should have enough time for some final tests! Important things to check in the few days left before the official release:

  • How does the upgrade feel like, starting from Mandriva Linux 2010.1 and 2010.2 to Mageia 1 RC? see our upgrade test page;
  • Are your computers and peripherals properly recognised and handled by Mageia?
  • How does the installation process feel like to you? (see our testing procedure).

Mageia 1 stable will be available in 13 days! Stay tuned!

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Mageia abroad

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

This is the unavoidable sequel to “Mageia at the Berlin Linuxtag“

Linuxtag

rda, ennael and boklm in Berlin

The fair is over, people have gone back to their daily routines. Now, what did we take home at the end of the day?

1. Mageia

We showed the name “Mageia”. The visitors who came by were informed by our people at the booth and the text of a large poster. Questions were not so much about the technical side but rather in the area of who we are, what we are and (and not least) why we are. This was an initial introduction to the Germans and it was received nicely by those who asked. Something the German Mageia community can build upon during the time and the events to come.

2. Mageia Conference

We had the opportunity to introduce Mageia in detail by a conference held by ennael. There wasn’t a large crowd but we did not expect that anyway, there were too many conferences at the same time (more than 230 in 4 days!). Still, those 20 people in the audience were a start.

3. Experiences abroad

The Germans at the booth already knew the environment, for the 3 visitors from France (ennael, rda and boklm) it was an interesting experience because this German event is very different to what they were used to see at French events. Such experiences give you a broader perspective and I’d like to encourage the French and also others to go to such events in other countries (if possible) to see and learn. We may improve our understanding of our neighbours…

One of the most important benefits of this event was meeting face-to-face. We were able to discuss many things directly, especially people who are working very close together, like rda and obgr_seneca (for example). We can look forward to all the nice things they are planning!

4. The FUN!

Then there was the fun! We had a nice dinner on Friday night and there were also those moments of comic and fun during the days. I may give you an example:

A visitor came to our partner (MandrivaUser.de) with whom we shared the booth. He was presented with the current Beta of Mandriva 2011 and then he asked our helpers about their opinion about the new menu style. They expressed their rather negative opinion, then the visitor presented his business card – he was a representative of RosaLabs, the company who invented this new menu style! 🙂

5. The T-Shirts

When looking at the pictures (see next paragraph) you will recognize we offered black and white Mageia T-shirts. These T-shirts are special – they are the T-shirts made for our first official appearance at FOSDEM 2011 and you will never again have the chance to get one of them!

Now you can!

We offer black and white T-shirts, all sizes. German orders please contact wobo AT mageia DOT org (price in Germany will be 10 Euros including shipping).
For international orders people in Paris will soon set up a way to facilitate purchasing those T-shirts.

6. Pictures

We took some pictures and I will upload them to the Mageia gallery in facebook ASAP. Please stay tuned for the URL (will post it in a comment to this blog). For those who understand German I will post a URL to an internet radio interview where wobo talks about Mageia.

 

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