José was 46 years old, father to 3 children. He, and his 16 year old son, who was accompanying him on a bicycle ride, died September the 11th after being struck by a car.
José was a major contributor to the world of Free Software, in particular Mageia, his favorite distribution, which he had adopted after Mandrake/Mandriva and in which he had been actively participating for some 20 years. Among his many contributions were the inclusion of hundreds of packages such as Audacity, Chromium, fuse2, gcompris, other very important packages such as various WiFi drivers, as well as many games (bzflag, alienarena, crack-attack, flightgear). He was a tester for Mageia Cauldron and a mentor for new packagers.
He was also a well known member of the Francophone LinuxFr.org website where his kind helpfulness was characteristic of him.
José Jorge was the founder of the LUG of Gers (France) named “Les GNUsquetaires”.
Condolences from all of the members of Mageia Linux go to his loved ones under the painful circumstances.
News from our package manager “urpmi” : Inherited from the Mandriva distribution, Mageia’s default package manager is URPMI. It offers a wide range of features to manage software repositories, install, update and remove applications packaged in rpm format. This standardized format is adopted by many well-known distributions, such as Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Suse and OpenSUSE. Urpmi is also used to update your distribution. This tool comes with many tools : – urpmi, urpme to install and remove applications, – urpmq to search for an application by querying repositories – urpmf to search for a package from the files it contains – urpmi.update to update your system and applications – urpmi.addmedia and urpmi.removemedia to add, remove your software repositories.
It is also the core application of : – rpmdrake, the GUI to install/uninstall packages – drakx, the Mageia installer from a DVD or the network For more information, see mageia’s wiki page.
The arrival of “dnf” in the distribution in recent years should also be noted. However, urpmi remains a major and founding tool for Mageia,appreciated by its users for its ease of use and efficiency. That’s why this package manager is maintained, continues to be stabilized and improved as new versions are released. Moreover, it is compatible with rpm from versions 4.9 to 4.16 as well as with perl from versions 5.8 to 5.32 and benefits from their latest evolutions. See here and here. URPMI and URPM documentation has been improved as can be seen here and here. It’s also well documented and translated in our documentation.
What’s next? The future is bright for URPMI. Indeed its development is not at a stand still and should take new directions. It is planned to use the dependency manager libdnf/libsolv which bringsa finer management of those, especially with the so-called “weak”dependencies (to do this we are waiting for a stabilization of their programming interfaces). In order for urpmi to be perfect, we need feedback from what doesn’t work. To do this, they must be uploaded in our bug tracker.
We are happy to announce the release of Mageia 8 Beta 1. After the good feedback from Alpha 1, there have been some improvements and fixes for this release, we look forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts so that we can continue to get Mageia 8 ready for release.
Here are some of the major packages included in this release:
Kernel – 5.7.9
glibc – 2.31
gcc – 10.1.1
rpm – 4.16.0
Chromium – 81
Firefox – 78
LibreOffice – 6.4.5
Plasma – 5.19.3
GNOME 3.36
Xfce 4.15.2
A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the installation media.
For those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded here, as always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.
The available ISO images are the same as in Mageia 7, offering installation media for both 32 and 64 bit systems, 64bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32bit live image for Xfce.
Some of the major improvements include improved ARM support, all packages have now been built for AArch64 and ARM v7, completing the transition away from Python 2 and very recent hardware support. There have been many improvements in the installer, which now has better support for F2FS and Nilfs2. Both the live and classical environments have been improved with the use of ZStd compression, this will give faster boot and installation times. There has also been considerable work with package management, rpm 4.16 has brought many improvements including automatic SSD detection and improved transaction speed, meta data parsing within urpmi has been accelerated through the use of ZStd compression, AppStream metadata use has been improved to allow better integration with GNOME and Plasma. A full list of features can improvements can be seen here.
We hope that the release works well for you, but if there are issues please report them to our Bugzilla so that we can get around to sorting them for release. If you want to get involved in ISO testing, packaging or any other aspect of Mageia, there is lots of information here.
A huge hand to all of the people involved with getting this release out of the door, and to all of the testers for giving us the feedback that we need to get Mageia 8 ready.
As with every release, the artwork for Mageia 8 will come from you, the great community that supports and makes Mageia possible. With development well underway, Alpha 1 has just been released, it’s time to start getting the artwork ready. As in previous years, we’re looking for your contributions and ideas, but not just images and photos – if you have icons and logos, or ideas on how login screens or animations should look, then it’s time to discuss or show them off.
We will normally choose a digital abstract piece using the colours of the Mageia logo for the signature background It should be easily cropped to different aspect ratios without losing the feel of the image and have a resolution of at least 3,200 by 2,400px, in order to accommodate a wide variety of monitors. Alternative background and screensavers have less restrictive guidelines, so if you feel like flexing your creativity, we’d love to see what you come up with.
Rules The contest begins on the 30th of July 2020 and will run until the 20th of August 2020, Mageia will provide 1 official background, 10 additional backgrounds and all the other bits we do to make Mageia look great. If you’d like to participate, it’s easy: Please submit your work to the Mageia 8 artwork drop. You also have the option to send a link to the Atelier mailing list. The Atelier team will choose 10 backgrounds from different contributors to be included in the “additional backgrounds”.
Prerequisites
minimal size: 3,200×2,400 px for images, preferably SVG for icons
no borders
no text inside: the Mageia logo may be placed for show, but will need to be removable
scalable or croppable for all possible aspect ratios: 4:3, 16:9, 16:10 etc.
License: CC By SA 3.0 or later
Please also have a look here for more information about things you have to watch out for or to see previous Mageia wallpapers. Some screensavers and the Mageia 7 background are uploaded on the artwork drop for reference. Photos will be considered for screensavers and additional backgrounds provided no recognisable people are visible. Please avoid copyrighted artwork, or, you must own the copyright and agree to the CC By SA 3.0 license. All the work needs to be original with the source files (SVG, xcf, etc) available and within Mageia’s artwork guidelines. Please upload a png or similar as they are much easier for previewing. We hope that these guidelines will make everything clear and help you to make something that will make Mageia look great. The guidelines cover the Official Mageia Logo, colour scheme, website motif, fonts, wallpaper and other elements. The Mageia official logo is also covered by our Trademark Policy. Take a moment to learn the rules, then, jump in and create with us!
Final choice The final winners will be chosen by the Mageia council and announced on the Mageia blog.
We are happy to announce the release of the test images of Mageia 8. These are available to early testers to help with the development towards a stable final release of Mageia 8. There have been large scale updates of all packages as well as new features implemented to improve what Mageia already offered. Some of the key updates include:
Kernel – 5.7.4
glib – 2.31
gcc – 10.1.1
rpm – 4.16.0
Chromium – 81
Firefox – 68.9
LibreOffice – 6.4.4
Plasma – 5.19.1
GNOME 3.37
Xfce 4.15.2
A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the installation media.
For those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded here, as always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.
The available ISO images are the same as in Mageia 7, offering installation media for both 32 and 64bit systems, 64bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32bit live image for Xfce.
Some of the major improvements include improved ARM support, all packages have now been built for Aarch64 and ARM v7, completing the transition away from Python 2 and very recent hardware support. There have been many improvements to the installer, which now has better support for F2FS and Nilfs2. Both the live and classical environments have been improved with the use of ZStd compression, this will give faster boot and installation times. There has also been considerable work with package management, rpm 4.16 has brought many improvements including automatic SSD detection and improved transaction speed, while metadata parsing within urpmi has also been accelerated through the use of ZStd compression, AppStream metadata use has been improved to allow better integration with GNOME and Plasma. A full list of features can improvements can be seen here.
We hope that the release works well for you, but if there are issues please report them to our Bugzilla so that we can get around to sorting them for release. If you want to get involved in ISO testing, packaging or any other aspect of Mageia, there is lots of information here.
A huge hand to all of the people involved with getting this release out of the door, and to all of the testers for giving us the feedback that we need to get Mageia 8 ready. We look forward to hearing your feedback!
