Mageia: some news about the project

Posted on October 2, 2010 by Anne Nicolas
Given all the contribution proposals we received so far, it looks like Mageia has the potential to be a great success! For those who are wondering what is happening right now, here are some news about various subjects:
  • In order to answer the main questions about the Mageia project, a FAQ is now available on the web site. Feel free to comment and ask for more questions if you think some subjects are missing.
  • The Mageia association is going to be registered on Monday with an official publication in about 1 month (once reviewed by the french administration), thanks to Severine and rtp
  • A Mageia Manifesto is in progress. We provided a list of items to help Graham Lauder and some marketing & communication guys to work on a first draft
  • A sysadmin team has been created by nicolas (boklm), to start working on the new infrastructure
  • For the hardware infrastructure, we received proposals for servers and hosting. We now have the hardware to be able to setup a build system and host the main services. We already started the setup of a virtual machine offered by gandi.net which we will use soon to host the web sites and blog. Regarding the hosting of the other servers, we have a proposal for one year and are already working on a longer term solution.
  • Misc is working on a planning for the deployment of the buildsystem (roughly, 4/5 days from scratch without server installation if all goes well)
  • Olivier (Nanar) should soon announce some plans for the mirrors and a web application to take care of this. We already have many proposals for Mageia local mirrors to host packages and ISOs. But we are still looking for Tier1 mirrors.
  • Buchan is working on the LDAP part of the infrastructure
  • Mageia has been contacted by various newspapers, podcasts, webTV, web Radio… etc. All these interviews took lot of time for preparation but you will hear about Mageia soon 🙂
  • Donations are going really well, nearly 5.000 € and 100 donors! We will publish monthly financial reports so that you can follow how it’s being used. The first expenses will be hard disk drives, domain names and the Mageia trademark registration
  • You will soon be able to buy Mageia tee-shirts. We don’t have an official logo yet, but don’t worry, it is still possible to make fun tshirts without a logo.
Coming soon on this blog, more news about the general organization of the Mageia project, stay tuned!
Freely
Mageia team
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Join the Blog Team (translate, post, moderate, …)

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

Hello boys and girls,

As you know, we are working on the localization of the Mageia Blog.
I’m looking for volunteers to join the Blog Team (BT).

What is the role of the Blog Team?
– Manage blogs ;
– Manage comments (moderate, validate…) ;
– Publish content (in coordination with the BT, the Communication Team and the other related teams) ;
– Translate content from the EN blog ;
– Spread the birth of the localized blogs ;
– Inform the project and needed people about important comments or remarks in the threads of a blog.

I will soon publish a wiki entry about the rules of the BT and the process to follow for each tasks asked.

For the moment, the blogs are: de/ es/ fr/ it/ pt_br/ ru/ (and “en” by default).
If you want to see a new language or locale, just answer by posting a comment on this thread to ask/propose a new one. Beware, if you ask for a new one, you will be in charge of it!

To summarize, we need translators and moderators for each blog.
So, let’s go to apply. 🙂

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New development release name has been chosen, Cauldron!

Posted on September 26, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

Since we’re starting with a new base, a brand new name for the development release in Mageia needed to be found.

This was one of the – many – tasks that needed to be done to get Mageia going (although admittedly one of the fun tasks :)). Olivier Thauvin, aka Nanar, accepted to take on this task and things started rolling when he posted a new thread in the mageia-discuss mailing list, with a couple of initially proposed names. Of course, brainstorming ensued between the community members (in one really long thread). After gathering enough ideas / name proposals, a doodle poll was conducted. The poll ended on Friday 24th of September and the winner is Cauldron.

In Mandriva the development release was named Cooker. The development release of Mageia will be, like Cooker, a rolling distro. The idea here is that any new packages go into the development release first, where they’re tested and any bugs found in them are fixed; then when the development cycle nears its end the repositories are frozen in preparation for pushing a new stable release (after that the development distro starts again). Of course it’s not recommended to run development releases on day-to-day production machines as, by its very nature, it’s unstable and prone to break. Things tend to break quite a good number of times in development releases however they get fixed pretty fast too, so if you like living on the cutting edge don’t hesitate to join forces with those brave souls who’ll be testing Cauldron; the more the testers the better the stable release that’ll follow as more bugs will get squashed this way.

Hopefully stuff will be bubbling in Cauldron soon 🙂

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State of the Kitchen

Posted on September 22, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

Hear, hear!

Now the announcement has been such a big success, discussions are already on-going in the mailing-lists (again, you’re all amazing, guys!), we need now to set up strong bases for Mageia. We will come back to each of these points with more details but here is a overview.

Infrastructure & tools

Infrastructure setup is one of the most important things. It has started by using temporary resources to have main services online as soon as possible:

  • The Mageia blog went online yesterday (in English only for now, we’ll set other locales up very soon)
  • A temporary wiki has been opened to help everyone register in the various proposed teams; these teams will have dedicated mailing-lists for starters, will have to name one representative + one delegate, then they can start working on their various tasks (see below)
  • User Forums are also on the way – we will have an official English-speaking forum, together with links to local forums which are already active and ready to welcome users from different countries (Blogdrake, mandrivausers-de, MLO…). If you think a language is not supported by an existing local forum, please email us at mageia-contact AT gmail.com so that we can add for now a new instance on Mageia server(s). Special thanks to Paul Willard and Raphael Jadot who will lead this hard task 🙂
  • We have already many proposals for Mageia mirrors coming in
  • Discussions are on-going and we’re working on the build-system setup; that will be the first major technical milestone for all of us to start to cook the real meat.

Logo

We need a logo (and a great one!) and a global design for Mageia!

We’ve already drafted these logo guidelines (please review them carefully) and you will find all current proposals in this gallery. Feel free to upload new ones and/or comment on existing ones.

Organisation

We are still working on creating the association for Mageia. It will allow to have a board officially leading the project, to get some funding, to ask for various kinds of help and to be able to insure Mageia future.

Statutes are still being written (in French) and the founding board should be constituted soon (we hope it will be balanced and effective, although specifically dedicated to the founding task; renewal elections by third will start later on). This board will then lead the kitchen, coordinating with each team delegates to drive the various aspects of the distribution (design, development, testing, production, distribution, advocacy… etc) forward.

We still have open questions which we’d like feedback about before we reach a final decision. We will detail our understanding of the functions of the organisation in a following post and collect advices on specific points before we decide what to do.

Oh, by the way, you can now make donations using Paypal and/or bank transfer. Funding is critical so we can set up then above independent infrastructure and the various other needed pieces.

Finally we have already many contacts with other communities around Mandriva. Unity Linux is already having a very active part in the discussions. Others are welcome to join: just contact us on IRC, via the mailing-lists or by personal email.

Again, we’re so grateful for your support!

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Thank you!

Posted on September 21, 2010 by Anne Nicolas

We don’t know from where to begin this, so let’s just start it the most obvious way.

Guys, thank you.

Thank you so much for your enthusiasm, your calls for joining, for helping this project, for providing insights about hardware infrastructure, build system, community management, artwork, so many things!

It’s been different for each of us, but the idea of making something different has been brewing for months now. Things really came together a few days ago as discussions were becoming more concrete, and now here we are.

We knew that it was an important move; that we would probably miss a few steps and that we should proceed with care. Your reception of the news just exceeded our wildest dreams.

Seeing so many people from the cooker and user communities, as well as people who left in the previous years, converging all together is confirming our resolution that making the distribution fully community-based was, is, the right move.

It’s not about just a small group of people, it’s about what we all can do with a technology we design, build and use every day through an organisation that ensures collaboration, innovation, production and benefits to everyone.

Again, this won’t be easy, instant or straightforward. We’re laying down the first organisational steps so all of us can start working on this new project.

So, let’s start together!

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