Mageia supports LibreOffice

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

After the announcement of LibreOffice, Mageia decided to give full official support to this new project.

There are obvious similarities between the histories of Mageia and LibreOffice. Because both projects futures were unclear, teams decided – in both projects respectively – to create a fork that respects the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) principles and sets a more predictable governance model that relies on its community.

We believe LibreOffice will be a great success for developers and users alike and that it will provide full and efficient document-processing applications based on open standards.

We look forward to packaging, and contributing to the LibreOffice project and we will provide it in the upcoming Mageia releases.

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

Mageia: under construction!

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

Here is the latest news from the front:

  • Buildsystem: after the installation of the servers in the ielo.net datacenter, hard work has started on the  buildsystem installation and configuration. The sysadm team is basing the new infrastructure for now on Mandriva Linux one, adding lots of cleaning and improvements. Puppet is the main software used to centralize the administration and Misc is working on writing all the needed script for the Mageia environment. Together with lots of bug fixes and improvements, iurt is now installed on build nodes (thanks Blino!). Iurt is a recompilation bot which monitors lists of packages of different architectures and recompiles each package in a separate clean chroot each time it is needed.
    At the same time, Buchan installed and configured the LDAP server. It will provide the Mageia centralized authentication together with a directory used for all the Mageia applications. CatDap will be a very easy to use GUI, developed with Catalyst. It will allow users to register a Mageia account, ask for various applications access (mailing-lists, bugzilla, forums…), modify it at any time with a click. CatDap is now installed and tests are in progress. The other big work is about Subversion. Tests are in progress for importing packages so that it can be all ready for first submissions. More news soon :). Scheduler has also been installed and work will start soon on repsys, the package submission tool.
  • Blog and web site: a dedicated virtual machine will be used to host the blog and the web site for Mageia (thanks again to Gandi). They will be migrated soon as they are still hosted on PLF servers (thanks again to the PLF guys).
  • Mirrors: on the mirrors side, we have a second primary mirror ready to sync Mageia, Ibiblio, together with Jussieu. Olivier (aka Nanar) has finalized the first online version for the mirrors management application. You can now propose a mirror to be added to the official list of Mageia mirrors, check for an existing one and even have a look at the Mageia mirrors map. Still some work to do to plug it with urpmi, some cleaning, improvements… Stay tuned!
  • Mageia wiki: work is in progress to setup the permanent Mageia wiki. Technical specifications have been collected here to choose the most suitable solution. We used also wikimatrix to work on functionalities. Mediawiki is the most favourable candidate so far. Thomas Canniot gave a big hand on wiki structure.
  • Roadmap and specifications: as a reminder, you will find the first roadmap and specifications in the wiki, it should answer main questions about the next six months.
  • Logo and design: as said in a previous post, the deadline for logo proposals, which should follow the Mageia artwork guidelines, is Nov. 9th 2010 (coming Tuesday!). Work has been launched in artwork team to provide Mageia with its own set of icons as many will be used especially in configuration tools.
  • mageia-app-db: Samuel Verschelde (aka Stormi) will contribute to Mageia by proposing a new tool for packages dedicated to end users (more information: first document, first specifications. It has been announced on the mageia-discuss mailing-list. Samuel listed the main features. It will allow to browse the package database and provide the main informations about packages. It focuses also on interaction between users, testers and packagers (backports requests and voting, new package requests and voting, package testing requests (i.e. packagers asking users to test a certain package before pushing it to the official repositories). Finally its customisable user notifications on your home page, RSS feed or e-mail (new backports available of your favourite software, new update candidates available and awaiting testing… etc.)

If you want to contribute to any of these projects, you can contact us via the Mageia mailing-lists: translation, web design, development, tests… etc, you are very welcome!

Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments

News from admins

Posted on October 23, 2010 by Anne Nicolas
On behalf of the Mageia system administration team (aka sysadm team), I am happy to announce that we finally managed to rack our first servers in Marseille on Friday, despite the gas-oil shortage, the strikes, and the various issues we had!


Server

Svn server being installed

All of this would not have been possible without the generous offer of Ielo.net and Lost Oasis, who offered to host our servers in their data-center in Marseille. They have been already hosting zarb.org, TuxFamily and LeaLinux since several years, and provided a lot of support to free software in France.


Also this would not not have been possible without the help of the several donors who helped us with hardware and money to buy disks and to travel to the south of the country. Again, many thanks to all of you.


And finally, this would not have been possible without the hard work of my team mates, Damien and Nicolas who drove from Paris to Marseille, fetched the pieces and assembled the servers, and without the help of Pascal who lent us a hand when setting everything up, and who volunteered to drive to the server room and  push the button in case of problems. We hope we will not ask him to do it too many times, and we would love to have remote administration, but this was not a option given the fact that only one server had one RAC.


So let’s welcome Alamut, Ecosse, Jonund, Valstar and soon Fiona. For those that wonder where does the names come from, we have played a simple game on the sysadm list (which is badly configured at the moment I am writing this but it is a public mailing list by design, this will be fixed later).
For the techno addicts that would like to see the hardware specs, we will document them on the wiki later, once we have set up the permanent wiki.


So the next steps of infrastructure deployment, after some deserved rest (in what’s left of the weekend), will be to set up the basic infrastructure for administration (ie puppet, svn, accounts, etc).
Then we will proceed into migrating the DNS from zarb.org to our servers, and set up a first LDAP directory to hold accounts, as this is a central component in our planned infrastructure. After that we will have to setup SQL servers, apache, and some web applications like Epoll, to start working on team creation. Stay tuned for news and pictures on the blog, (and thanks for reading until the end 🙂 ).
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 5 Comments

One month later: Mageia’s home is almost habitable!

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Anne Nicolas
Work is going on in quite a good way? yep, here is the latest news from the front!

  • Mageia hosting: as announced in the previous post, we have now a full hosting solution for the Mageia project. Servers are now in Marseille, in ielo.net datacenter. All is now ready to be configured by Saturday for the Mageia build system. We bought some hardware (hard disks, 1 backup server, power switch) in order to make it easier to manage the Mageia servers. Build system team will work in coming week on setting it up and let you guys start at last doing some real work :).
  • Central authentication: Along with setting up the build system, the team is working on an LDAP centralized solution to manage all authenticated services (Bugzilla, build system, svn, blog, forums…). It will come with a web interface to be as easy as a click for all users. Buchan has already committed a first version, you can have a look at the source code here: svn://svn.mageia.org/soft/identity (anonymous). Code is being reviewed before we use it in production.
  • The Mageia roadmap and policies: a first official statement will be proposed by the end of this month: a roadmap for the coming 6 months, a layout for Mageia repositories, a statement about various license issues and drafts to discuss for various project policies.
  • Association: Mageia.Org creation is on the way in the French administration. We should have it officially created within 4 weeks. For now we have a receipt that allows us to open a bank account, which we will do in the coming days. It will be usable as soon as Mageia.Org creation is official. So for now we keep using the help of AUFML for accepting donations (thanks to the AUFML guys again for helping us with this!).
  • Code of Conduct: in order to help daily work, a code of conduct is now available. The Mageia team decided to not reinvent the wheel and worked from Mandriva Linux community Code of Conduct. It has been a bit adapted to the Mageia community’s needs and is available for translation.

Freely

Mageia team

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments