Planet Mageia (English)

On December 1st, the Mageia development team met to discuss the progress of Mageia 10, establishing an initial release roadmap and addressing the status of key software stacks.

A tentative schedule was agreed upon, aiming to start the release cycle as soon as possible with a first alpha version to be released “yesterday” (here I’m kidding on the square), a first beta due in the first half of January 2026 followed by a second beta a month later. The release candidate is scheduled two weeks after the second beta while the final release is expected in April 2026.

This sequence aims to prevent the software stacks in Mageia 10 from becoming obsolete before its stable release and at the same time to ensure users that everything works perfectly as per our standards.

The team also reviewed the status of various software stacks to be included in the next version:

• PHP: versions 8.5 (in Cauldron) and 8.4 (likely in parallel) will be included to support a wider range of websites.
• Python: no immediate move to Python 3.14 is planned.
• Ruby: no planned update to Ruby 4.0.0, as it does not contain major changes.
• Java: Java 21 will be kept as the LTS (Long-Term Support) version to ensure 32-bit support, but Java 25 (the latest version) will be available as java-latest for 64-bit architectures.
• GCC and LLVM: GCC is currently at 15.2.0, and LLVM at 20.1.8; the decision was to stay with these for the release.
• Go/Golang: It was agreed to move to version 1.25.x, with a focus on fixing dependent packages that need updating (around 820 packages).
• Kernel: The current kernel is 6.12.XX (LTS). There is an ongoing discussion about adopting Kernel 6.18.XX (the next LTS) for better support of the latest hardware, especially for gaming.

For the desktop environments, LXDE and LXQt are already up to date but there is still an open discussion about KDE and GNOME. LibreOffice is at 25.8.3, with 26.2 planned for the end of January 2026.

You can find a more detailed list of stacks/apps/software versions proposed here.

Now the critical points.

At the time of the team meeting, creation of 32-bit ISOs was blocked due to a segfault in perl-URPM, which has since been overcome.

The problem of manually updating GPG keys and crypto-policies for migration from Mageia 9 to Mageia 10 was raised. The team is looking for a solution to be implemented in Mageia 9 prior to the release.

Mozilla and other vendors are abandoning the 32-bit architecture, making it increasingly difficult to maintain full support.

There is uncertainty about the status of Chromium as it’s currently unmaintained.

The work on integrating two new rented ARM build nodes is well underway, with progress made on using Docker containers for builds, although minor modifications to the ulri and iurt tools are required.

The meeting highlighted a constructive and progress-oriented climate. Mageia 10 appears ready to enter the Alpha phase, with awareness of the problems still to be solved – especially regarding i686 – the kernel and the tuning of the various software stacks.

The community is active and collaborative, and the consolidation work done so far lays a solid foundation for a stable release in the coming months.

Further updates on the work will follow but we still recommend keeping Release Notes and Errata pages monitored.

We’re still welcoming your contribution to test our distribution (or even more contribute to it)!

As you can see, our blogs are still up and running.

However, the servers hosting most of the rest of our infrastructure, like the forums, wiki and bugzilla, are not.

I assume we are under attack from bots again, but that needs to be confirmed by one of our sysadmins.

Anyway, the issue is known, we will try to update this message as soon as we know more.

1st update : a switch in the datacenter is broken, it should be replaced. A new one is on its way to Marseille. (2025-09-18, at 9:45 CEST)

2nd update: The outage is still ongoing, but we have set up a replica of the mirror list so that updates and new installations are no longer blocked (2025-09-24, at 8:00 CEST).

3rd update: After the mirrorlist replication, www.mageia.org was redirected to blog.mageia.org. (2025-09-24, 08.49 CEST)

4th update: Unfortunately, it appears that users using DNF instead of URPMI (the legacy tool in Mageia for updates) still cannot use the mirrorlist. The reason is, that DNF uses a different mirrorlist, created for downloading ISOs. That mirrorlist has not been replicated. As a workaround you can, in a terminal/konsole as root:

cp -a /etc/yum.repos.d/ /etc/yum.repos.d_original/
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
sed -i 's/^mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/' *
sed -i 's/#baseurl/baseurl/' *

Doing that will set https://mirrors.kernel.org as your fixed mirror, so that you can install packages again. (2025-09-24 15:57 CEST) (Edit: add the forgotten -i switch to sed, 16:20 CEST)

5th update: We were notified that the issue at the datacenter will be fixed ultimately tomorrow (2025-09-25 11:50 CEST) (Edit: put the code above in a code block instead of in a list, 13:31CEST)

6th update: We received no update from the datacenter, but we are sure there is a good reason for that. Note that they have always hosted us for free (2025-09-27 10:50 CEST).

7th update: There was certainly a good reason, they had not yet received the switch. They now expect to receive it today (2025-09-30 12:53 CEST).

8th update: According to the datacenter people, the ordered switch is now expected to arrive at the datacenter tomorrow. It will be then installed and we hope to recover the servers back to normal Monday or Tuesday at the latest (2025-10-02 16:00 CEST).

9th update: the router has been delivered in the DC and the old one replaced, last week someone went in the DC to cable stuff, but there seems to be an issue with fibers now, so our servers are still not reachable. We have not yet information on when the next operation is scheduled in
order to fix that remaining issue (2025-10-07 9:00 CEST).

10th update: The servers are back! (2025-10-07 15:00 CEST)

Originally posted in our French blog by Guillaume Royer.

The Capitole du Libre is one of the biggest events in France’s free software community. It will take place on November 15 and 16. Registration is required, but admission is free. Many representatives of the free software community will be in attendance.

• Conferences…
• Workshops
• Round table discussions
• Lan Parties (network gaming)

There will also be food trucks for foodies and an association village.

Our friend Dtux has reserved a spot for Mageia to be represented at this major event. If you are a Mageia user or just curious, feel free to come and visit our booth.

For those who are more motivated, if you feel like it, you can come and lend a hand with:

• Carrying, setting up and removing equipment
• Relieving the volunteers at our booth

We hope to meet you there to discuss Mageia and free software!!

Translated with DeepL.com (free version), proofread and enhanced by Atelier Team.

By Aguador.

The end is coming, the end is coming…the end of Windows 10 support, that is…and as part of the Linux community we can help those affected.

As of 14 October support for Windows 10 will end, leaving its users of older, less powerful machines three choices:

• Suffer slower performance (IF their machine does at least meet the minimum requirements for Win 11)
• Pay for support to continue with Win 10
• Buy new, more powerful equipment

As Linux users we know that these are not the only choices, Linux offers a range of options to suit virtually any personal taste and computer. KDE, source of one of Mageia’s flagship¹ desktops, has an attractive multimedia website² for the about-to-be orphaned Windows users.

It lays out the case for switching to Linux, with Plasma and the KDE universe of software as the alternative. The site presents the modern features of KDE-Plasma, the advantages of Free and Open Source Software, and compatibility with files produced by proprietary software. It is a great resource which Mageia community members can offer friends and colleagues facing “the end”. And, of course, as mageians, we can provide that link along with an offer to help them in getting set up with Mageia.

You do not use Plasma or do not think it is right for your friends or friends’ machines? The site also offers links to other popular desktops and, at the end, a link to the more general Endof10 website, which is also hosted by KDE. It not only offers the arguments for switching to Linux, but provides guidance in choosing a system and, most importantly, places around the world where people can find hands-on help in making the switch.

As Mageia users we know it offers all the beauty and power of Plasma and the KDE suite of programs. So do your friends, family, colleagues and neighbours a favour by not only sharing these sites (and, of course, Mageia’s), but also showing Plasma and/or other desktops in action on your machine. Oh, and if you want to write a Live ISO to a USB stick, you can even show them the Mageia we use every day in action on THEIR machines.

To us mageians it is obvious, that Mageia 9 > Win10 is not a typo!

1. Surprise: we treat all of our desktops as flagships! ︎
2. Note that the KDE videos require having DRM enabled ︎

Written by katnatek.

This is an unusual post… As we warned in the past updates MGASA-2025-0195¹, MGASA-2025-0197² and MGASA-2025-0201³, the updates for Firefox and Thunderbird could not be delivered for armv7hl for a long time.

The issue had two causes. The first one, noticed during the QA process for the linked Security Advisories, was produced by a bug in the tools used to build Firefox for this architecture⁴.

The second one was harder to squash, and we were on the verge of informing you that we could not continue updating these software products in Mageia 9 for the armv7hl architecture.

But then, Pascal Terjan (one of our packagers), found a patch in the Debian community for exactly the same issue (a Rust component was using the fat link time optimization)

Firefox is now updated in all architectures, in both Mageia 9 and Cauldron, to the 128.12.0 ESR version – an upgrade from 115.13.0 on armv7hl – and Thunderbird will follow once version 128.12 is ready.

1. https://advisories.mageia.org/MGASA-2025-0195.html ︎
2. https://advisories.mageia.org/MGASA-2025-0197.html ︎
3. https://advisories.mageia.org/MGASA-2025-0201.html ︎
4. https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34422 ︎

We have always had bots visiting our website. They were mostly kind bots, like the crawlers that keep the databases of search engines up-to-date. Those kind bots start by looking at our robots.txt files before doing anything, and respect the restrictions that are set in those files.

However, things have changed. Like other websites, for instance Wikipedia, we are more and more being visited by AI scrapers, bots that scrape the Internet for anything they can find to train AI applications. They are usually extremely hungry for information, so they download much, much more than an ordinary user would do. Moreover, many of them are impolite: they don’t respect the rules set in our robots.txt files, they hide who they really are, they don’t put a little pause in between requests – on the contrary, they hammer our servers with requests from lots and lots of different IP addresses at the same time. The result is that parts of mageia.org, like our Bugzilla, Wiki and Forums, become unreachable.

Below you can see the CPU load of one of our most important servers, where, amongst other things, our forums and wiki are located:

Even if our infra upgrade had already been finished, this would be really hard to mitigate.

Blocking the used IP addresses is useless because they constantly switch to new ones. One of our sysadmins just told me about a big issue: “mobile proxies” where bots proxy their request through unsuspecting users’ phones. That makes the requests look much more legitimate and hard to block without also blocking real users. A lot of that happens without users even knowing their phone is being used like this. Some applications include proxies along with some game or other app and hide it in fine print in the terms of service. Last year, it was reported that Google had removed a bunch of such applications from their store.

Apart from phones, there are IoT devices and also ordinary computers that ended up in botnets, because they were not well protected. They can be used for AI scraping and probably are now.

Our sysadmins do time and again succeed in mitigating the problem, but it is a “cat and mouse game”, so the problem is likely to reoccur.

If you know people working on AI applications which need to be trained, please ask them to make sure their bots read and respect the robots.txt files they encounter. And, of course, please nudge your friends and family, when you think they need that, to make sure their computers and other smart devices get all security updates as soon as they are released.

To do a good job, we need good tools. Some of our servers are old, no longer powerful enough and have limited disk resources to meet the needs of developers. RPM manufacturing takes a long time and this is detrimental to the efficiency of maintaining and evolving the distribution. In short, the machines are well depreciated.

This is why our infrastructure is first getting a makeover. Better adapted to new technologies, it will allow our developers to work faster and more efficiently.

So where is this new infrastructure?

 We received 5 new servers:

– 2 new nodes for building packages: HPE ProLiant DL 360 Gen10 – 2xXeon 6126 (12C/2.6GHz) –

256GB RAM – 2xSSD 3.8TB HW Raid 1 – 2x10Gb/s NICs

– 2 servers to replace sucuk and duvel: HPE ProLiant DL 380 Gen10 – 2 Xeon 6126 (12C/2.6GHz) –

256GB RAM – 2xSSD 3.8TB HW Raid 1 – 10xHDD 12TB HW Raid 5 – 2x10Gb/s NICs

– 1 server for deployment and backup: HPE ProLiant DL80 Gen9 – 2xXeon  E5-2603v4

(6C/1.7GHz) – 256GB RAM – 6xHDD 6TB (donated, with some renewed parts)

– 1 Arista 7120T switch 20xRJ-45 10Gb/s 4xSFP+ 10Gb/s for interconnecting the machines

One of the ideas is to use the latest server to deploy quickly and as automatically as possible the construction nodes and other machines. The method is ready for x86_64 nodes and is being finalized for ARM nodes. The preparation of the servers takes time because the teams anticipate the future and future developments.

Once the preparation part of our servers is finished, the integration part into the Data Center will remain.

We are therefore taking our time to do things well in order to perpetuate the future and future versions of Mageia.

In the meantime, the future version 10 of Mageia continues to bubble in its cauldron! But we are not ready yet to plan a release date for the moment.

Feel free to come and strengthen our teams.

Written by Atelier Team

That was fast: we have only just explained why our Mageia Application Database was offline and now papoteur tells us that new MADb is ready to be used.

Open the site and at first glance you might think you have somehow connected to the old site as the differences between it and the new one are hard to spot (the top one is the old site):

However, this is only the outward appearance, as the style sheets (CSS) were re-used with little modification.

The tool itself, previously written in PHP, has been completely rewritten from scratch, using Python, Flask, Jinja2 and DNF5, so the runtime code is entirely new. Papoteur showed two code snippets as an example of what really changed (again, the top one is old):

That is as different as a page from an English book compared to a page from its Indonesian translation!

About 3000 new lines of code were written for this new MADb, which is now live and ready to answer your queries about Mageia applications.

As you use the site, we ask you to think about what questions you feel an integrated help function (not yet available) should answer, and also what you feel we should include in a new wiki article about MADb. Please note your suggestions in the comments to this post, as you are all the Mageia community and this tool is for you.

Thanks to the MLO community for hosting new MADb.

UPDATE: It is now possible to visit the new MADb here https://madb.mageialinux-online.org/. It will take a bit longer for https://madb.mageia.org/ to link to it.

Written by aguador.

In Mageia, MADb, the Mageia App Db, has been an essential tool, particularly for QA (Quality Assurance) testers. It is the goto site for information on applications in our repositories with links to bug reports, priorities for updates, version comparisons and more. Searchable by Mageia version and CPU architecture, the site has not only been key for developers and testers, but many users as well who have found it an alternative to searching with our MCC control center or the command line when looking for a package to do (“whatever”).

But, er, “Houston, we have a problem.” If I go to MADb (https://madb.mageia.org/) all I got was the error message below and now a redirect to this post!

MADb was not affected by the move of Mageia’s servers announced on this blog (https://blog.mageia.org/en/2024/10/08/most-of-our-servers-will-be-offline-because-they-are-relocating/) early this month because it was originally developed by two of our contributors many years ago, and running on a different server. Mageia.Org took over ownership of their rented server a few months ago. Unfortunately, that server passed away and since the technology behind the old MADb is not compatible with newer infrastructure (mostly newer php-version), we cannot bring it back as it was. However, not all was lost!

Back in April, papoteur had submitted his initial work on a new version of MADb for testing…and since then it has undergone numerous revisions and improvements. However, it still remains “under wraps” for most users (like the author of this post!) until everyone, above all papoteur, is satisfied that it is not only a solid db interface for users, but is even better than before.

Since MADb has played such a vital role in testing, the development version is available to the QA team and other testers. It is only fair that they get the first look and use given all the work they do to assure that Mageia remains a quality distro. The rest of us simply need a bit more patience.

Ah, and not to forget the servers, not only was the move successful, with the other services affected now back up and running smoothly, but we expect to announce more good news about our servers, soon. Apart from that, most Mageia mirrors are in a good shape (they are all hosted on external servers, which we do not control).

We are pleased to announce that our servers in Marseille will be moving to new premises, still provided free of charge by IELO. As a result, some services as the bug tracker, wiki, code servers, build system and others will be offline. The planned date is between now and October 9, 2024.

We apologize for the inconvenience. This is a necessary step before hardware renewal.

[Update October 9, 2024] The operation is done, all servers are back.