A newcomer in Mageia: Maven

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

(proposed by dmorgan)

The Java packaging in Mandriva 2010.1 (from which Mageia was forked) was just unusable. Many of the packages were obsolete and not really maintained. The task of updating packages had become very difficult as Maven, a now very common Java project build tool, was not properly integrated in the distribution. Many Java libraries installed using the old packages would not be usable by Maven. Moreover the version of Maven was obsolete and would not allow building recent software. This was a serious problem for maintaining the Java stack.

Fortunately, thanks to the collaboration between Mageia (dmorgan), openSUSE (Stephen Shaw) and Fedora (Alexander Kurtakov and Stanislav Ochotnicky), the first release of Mageia will include a fully updated and clean Java stack. Maven is now available as version 3.0.3. More than 200 Java packages have been updated and are now correctly integrated with Maven.

We hope that this update will help us maintain more java packages in the future. If you are a Java user or packager, your feedback is welcome on the Mageia development mailing list or the Mageia Bugzilla.

If you are interested in Java and packaging, we need your help in the Java team. People from this team will:

  • help keeping the Mageia Java stack up to date
  • collaborate with other linux distributions to share packages and patches when possible
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Live CDs are now available for tests!

Posted on April 28, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

It took more time than expected but here they are: live CD ISOs for Mageia beta2. You will find, for now, 2 ISOs; one for each of KDE4 and GNOME. They include a limited set of supported languages (due to size constraints). The plan is to provide more ISOs, each ISO including a specific set of supported languages.

Download ISOs

It’s easy!

Supported languages

  • German (de)
  • English (Australia) (en_AU)
  • English (Canada) (en_CA)
  • English (British) (en_GB)
  • English (Ireland) (en_IE)
  • English (New-Zealand) (en_NZ)
  • English (American) (en_US)
  • English (South Africa) (en_ZA)
  • Spanish (es)
  • French (fr)
  • Italian (it)
  • Polish (pl)
  • Portuguese Brazil (pt_BR)
  • Russian (ru)

Enjoy testing and please, send us your feedback! Via the usual channels:

  • Filing a bug report in the Mageia Bugzilla
  • Contacting us on on the #mageia-dev IRC channel on Freenode
  • Sending an email to the Mageia-dev mailing list
Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

And now it’s time for beta 2

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

The second beta release of Mageia is now available for download and testing.

Go get it!

What’s new?

Lots of bug fixes and software updates! Kernel 2.6.38.4, LibreOffice 3.3.2.2, KDE 4.6.2, Firefox 4.0, Chromium browser 12.0.742.0 and many more.

We froze the software package versions last week. This means that no new, big, upstream code changes will be accepted in Mageia until our final release in June; then we will re-open the doors. We will now focus on fixing and reducing our bugs lists and refining and polishing the user experience.

We are setting up our security team so it’s ready for the final release; secteam’s job is to validate and push software security updates to your Mageia 1 installations.

Test it!

We need you to finalise this first release cycle! You as a tester, as a new user, as a contributor. This is the last week to check the following items:

  • is your favourite piece of software included? there’s still time to add some!
  • how does the upgrade feel like, starting from Mandriva Linux 2010.1 and 2010.2 to Mageia 1 beta 2? see our upgrade test page;
  • are your computers and peripherals properly recognised and handled by Mageia?
  • how does the installation process feel to you? (see our testing procedure).

Feel free to get in touch with us!

  • via our development mailing-list;
  • via IRC, on #mageia-dev on the Freenode server;
  • via our forum
  • via our Bugzilla
  • or catch one of us in Bordeaux, Berlin, Brussels, Cairo, Edinburgh, Genoa, Knoxville, Leuven, London, Lille, Lyon, Mexico, Moscow, Nanterre, Paris, Tampere or in many other places (beware: this method may require some coffee, beer or other beverage to work properly).

Mageia 1 final will be available in 35 days! \o/

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 21 Comments

On the tests again!

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

Mageia 1 Beta 1 is just out and it’s now time for testing. Let’s improve the quality of our favourite distro!

We have organized 2 testing days on April 11th and 12th. We’re testing the Beta 1 ISOs; please focus on these areas:

  • the list of software packages included in ISOs and repositories: please file a bug report if you notice that a package is missing and include an explanation of why we should add it;
  • upgrading from Mandriva Linux 2010.1 and 2010.2: we want to have an easy upgrade from these to Mageia 1 Final release, so these tests are really important. Please have a look on the upgrade test page;
  • hardware detection: please test your hardware configuration and file a bug report for any problem you experience;
  • the installation process: please test the Mageia installer from Beta 1 ISOs, following this installation testing procedure;
  • Asian locales (and input methods) and localisation in general.

You will find all sorts of help on the various Mageia support channels:

Thanks in advance for your contributions.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Try Mageia 1 Beta1 right now!

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Anne Nicolas

As has been stated in the Mageia roadmap, Mageia 1 Beta1 is now available for tests. The first Mageia stable release is planned for 1st of June (which is now quite near!). Our focus is always on improving distribution content but also lots of work was done on localisation support (locales, main applications, Asian locales). Core packages versions include: kernel 2.6.38.2, KDE 4.6.1, GNOME 2.32, Firefox 4.0, … More information is available in the release notes and web announcement.

For Beta1, the Mageia team has set up an easy page to help you download the ISO’s: have a look at the download page. Also note that torrents have been set up for Beta1, grab the relevant .torrent file from here. 2 Live CDs will be available on mirrors, on 7th of april the latest.

Update: as we have issues at the moment on live build, we will delay for some days live cds release. More information soon.

Once again we need your feedback to improve quality:

Enjoy!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 21 Comments