Mageia 8 End of Life

Mageia made it to a byte’s worth of releases when Mageia 8 was released in 2021. Mageia 8 was a very successful release which has received 21646 updated packages and thousands of security fixes, keeping it current and secure thanks to the work of the packaging, security, and QA teams. However, it is now time to bring this chapter to a close and focus on Mageia 9 and the support for both the latest software in the open-source ecosystem as well as the hardware support provided by newer kernels and other key software stacks that it provides. We hope that this will give users an excellent experience with a modern diverse open-source system. Full details of the features in Mageia 9 can be found in the release notes.

Support for old releases extends to 3 months after the latest release. We would therefore ask that users of Mageia 8 look to upgrade to Mageia 9, as support for Mageia 8 is ending with the last few updates being validated now. 

There are multiple update paths available, these include:

  • Upgrading through the update applet in the system tray
  • Upgrading from the command line as described in the release notes

It is also possible to upgrade or perform a clean installation from the classical installation media, while the live media can be used to test Mageia 9 or perform a clean installation. This option may be useful for users with limited bandwidth or performing updates on multiple installations. 

Please note, if performing a clean installation, all data not saved on a separate /home partition will be erased. Please check and make sure appropriate backups are in place.

If you have any questions or need some help with upgrades, assistance can be found on our forums which cover most languages or on the Mageia wiki.

Ready to play? Mageia for gamers and creators!

We are proud to announce that, after a lot of effort from our teams and especially from our team of developers, Mageia offers an improved experience for gamers, digital content creators, video editing and all multimedia.

We have taken a step forward, by offering a way to easily download and install two packages for AMD graphics cards, which offer some advanced features such as the activation of opencl for performance improvement in processes such as rendering in Blender and other 3D tools like CAD and PCB tools,and processing modules in Darktable, Steam games, Gimp, Libreoffice and any other application that requires these advanced features.

You can also find in Mageia a good catalogue of applications for content creation, and many others for playing the latest games as well as native linux games directly in our repositories.

In addition to adding an easy way to have opencl with these two packages for AMD graphics, Mageia has one of the best tools in the GNU/Linux universe for computers with NVIDIA-INTEL hybrid graphics. Mageia-prime makes it easy to switch between graphics cards on the same computer with a simple, one-click interface (more information about Mageia-Prime).

You should consider:

– The package amdgpupro-opencl-orca (More information here!) downloads AMD libraries for ie. Grenada XT, Carrizo and Polaris.

– The amdgpupro-opencl-pal package (More information here!) downloads AMD libraries for i.e. Banded Kestrel, Picasso and Vega.

To install it you have two options:

– From the MCC -> “Install & Remove Software” window, you must change both drop-down filters on the left of “Find:” to “All” and then search for the “amdgpupro-opencl-pal” or “amdgpupro-opencl-orca” package and install it.

– From a terminal as “root” user by typing: “urpmi amdgpupro-opencl-pal” or “urpmi amdgpupro-opencl-orca”.

Thinking of all users who work in these areas or want to have a good gaming experience with Mageia, we offer with this implementation full support for the two main options in graphics performance at the moment.

We hope this will contribute to improve the user experience with our great open source operating system!

A Social Meeting Between French-Speaking Mageians

It was not necessarily planned, but we have decided to tell you of our return in 2023.

A number of MLO members, some of whom are French-speaking contributors to the Mageia project, wanted to get together in September 2023 to renew ties and revitalise our little community. After the release of Mageia 9, it is time to take a step back from MLO and the Mageia project.

Although the MLO IRC room is active, we wanted to talk to each other through live voice-chat. So Jybz installed the VOIP software Mumble on our Mageia 8 server, which hosts our forum.  

So myself, Papoteur, Neoclust, Squidf, Jybz, AmiAge, JCStiegler, Anonymous23, nic80 and David got together on Saturday, the 23rd of September, at 2.00PM, after setting the sound configuration of our respective Mumble clients. Admittedly, it was not easy. Our equipment was of different builds where even the most experienced Linux user could not always master the subtleties of the tool.

We started by doing a roundtable introduction of  ourselves. We realised that we were scattered all over France (Strasbourg, Lyon, Nantes, Paris, Bordeaux, etc.). Many of us are former Mandrake or Mandriva users, others RedHat users. Most of us work in the IT sector, but not just that. 

We then discussed our respective experiences of Mageia 9. Those in a hurry quickly took the plunge (Squidf, Neoclust, Vouf). Papoteur and jybz stayed with Mageia 8…… David is working on the rolling distro “Cauldron” 😉 . Most users are not having problems with this new version, which they consider stable and fast. Recent hardware seems to be well supported. Squidf has installed it on a latest-generation laptop and a Surface Pro 9, using an adapted kernel. 

Jybz and Papoteur then told us that they had succeeded in porting Mageia to a Raspberry Pi 4, but still had problems producing a quality image. There is a desire to have an installation method similar to what is done with the net-install ISO.

As far as MLO is concerned, we confirmed our migration from IRC to Matrix, which provides additional collaborative features (file sharing, audio, etc.). We also discussed our migration to PHPBoost 6 which will take place this month, the improvements to be made to our community repository, and the migration of our server to Mageia 9.

As contributors and users of Mageia, we discussed the project and the work ahead for the community.  Now that Mageia 9 has been delivered, the priority is to launch infrastructure investments and work to better meet the needs of developers. There is also the urgent need to migrate madb. Some of the current hardware is old and undersized, which is detrimental to the productivity of the packagers. The first steps have been taken and the sysadmins are going to be very busy over the next few months.

Naturally, some of us couldn’t help but mention the need to modernise the tools for managing sources, integrating and deploying project content, and to have tools for better sharing the work to be done. 

Ideas were also put forward for improving package maintenance, communication, decision-making processes and project governance. But these are all part of an ongoing discussion on the Mageia mailing lists by the various squads, the council and the board.

It was a great social occasion, much appreciated by the participants, and one that we will no doubt be holding again.  It is just a shame that it was held remotely and not over a beer. And of course, we would have liked to share this moment with all the members of this wonderful Mageia community to get to know each other and create ties.

Mageia yours,

Vouf

Original post: https://blog.mageia.org/fr/2023/10/09/un-moment-convivial-entre-magiciens-francophones/

Translated with DeepL, corrected by Marc Paré

[SOLVED] Most of mageia.org temporarily down

Since a little over two hours ago, most of our servers can no longer be reached.

The issue is under investigation and we hope to have all of our servers back online soon.

Update: One of our sysadmins explained that our servers which can no longer be reached, are the ones in Marseille.

Update2: The temperature in the data center had risen too much after a problem with the electricity. Someone from MarsNet in Marseille is willing to try to start our servers, when checking theirs in the same data center, tomorrow morning.

Update 3, 0ctober 4, 10:25 UTC: The cooling system in the data center is broken and will be repaired. No attempt has been made to restart our servers, because it is still too hot for them to be able to function well.

Update 4, 0ctober 5, 09:04 UTC: The two broken cooling systems will be fixed today.

Trebot’s suggestion to temporarily redirect calls to http://www.mageia.org to this blog entry is a good one. Edit: On October 6, a slightly different solution was implemented.

Update 5, October 6, 09:18 UTC: The cooling systems should to be good now. The next step is for a sysadmin to travel to Marseille to restart our servers.

Update 6, October 6, 10:05 UTC: It is expected that up to two more days are needed for recovery.

Update 7, October 7, 10:52 UTC: Using the mirrorlist to install is supported again since last night.

Update 8, October 8, 20:55 UTC: Today we have been waiting for confirmation that the temperature in the data center is low enough now. We hope to get that confirmation when the weekend is over.

Update 9, October 9, 10:22 UTC: It was safe to start the servers again, which was done by someone from the DC. All booted up nicely, apart from the main one.

Update 10, October 9, 14:00 UTC: Everything works again 🙂

Mageia is in Matrix Social Network

We are proud to announce that Mageia has become part of the great social messaging network Matrix.

You can access this network by creating your account at here, and searching for our groups with the word “Mageia”.

As a Mageia user, you can join: #mageia-users:matrix.org

And if you want to collaborate with this great distro, first check the Mageia teams in the wiki and then look for us in Mageia Space in Matrix!

To connect to the Matrix network, you can use either Neochat or Nheko that are available in Mageia. If you prefer, you can access matrix directly from your browser at here. Note that the Element client is available in flatpak and in the various stores for use on your smartphone (Fdroid, etc.).

See you in the Matrix!

Mageia 9 has been released

Mageia 9 has been released and a lot of people are already using it.

You can find the release notes here
and the errata here

A huge big thank you to everyone who contributed to this great new Mageia version.

Even though almost not contributing myself, I have been using Mageia 9 without problems from when it started to be developed until now and I really like it.

The release of rc1 brings Mageia 9 stable even more closer to reality

We are proud to announce the first release candidate of Mageia 9. Since the release of beta 2 in May 2023 the Mageia team has worked to solve a number of stubborn issues and provide security fixes and new updates.

Thanks to all the teams that make up Mageia for the great work done in these months, to fix, test and validate all these new features and add the new wallpaper. The following features stand out:

  • Kernel – 6.4.3
  • glib – 2.36
  • gcc – 12.3.0
  • rpm – 4.18.0
  • Chromium – 114.0.5735.198
  • Firefox ESR – 102.13
  • LibreOffice – 7.5.4.2
  • Plasma – 5.27.5
  • GNOME – 44.2
  • Xfce – 4.18.4
  • LXQt – 1.3.0
  • mesa – 23.1.3

A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the installation media. There is currently a hard version freeze in effect pending the outcome of user testing of the release, including the upgrade mechanism.

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, but all testing and comments are welcome. You can read first the Release notes and the Errata.

We continue to offer (as few do) installation media for 32-bit and 64-bit systems, 64-bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32-bit live image for Xfce.

Join us in Mageia!

The release of beta2 brings Mageia 9 stable closer to reality

We are proud to announce the second beta of Mageia 9. Since the release of beta 1 in February 2023 the Mageia team has worked to solve a number of stubborn issues and provide security fixes and new updates.

Thanks to all the teams that make up Mageia for the great work done in these months, to fix, test and validate all these new features and add the new wallpaper. The following features stand out:

  • Kernel – 6.3.3
  • glib – 2.36
  • gcc – 12.3.0
  • rpm – 4.18.0
  • Chromium – 110
  • Firefox ESR – 102.11
  • LibreOffice – 7.5.2
  • Plasma – 5.27.4
  • GNOME – 44
  • Xfce – 4.18.1
  • LXQt – 1.3.0
  • mesa – 23.1.0

A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the installation media. There is currently a hard version freeze in effect pending the outcome of user testing of the release, including the upgrade mechanism.

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, but all testing and comments are welcome.

We continue to offer (as few do) installation media for 32-bit and 64-bit systems, 64-bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32-bit live image for Xfce.

Join us in Mageia!

Mageia 9 beta1 is already here

We are proud to announce the first beta of Mageia 9. A lot of fixes and new updates have followed since the first alpha back in November 2022.

Congratulations to all the teams that make up Mageia for the great work done in these months, to fix, test and validate all these new features, of which the following stand out:

Kernel – 6.1.11

glib – 2.36

gcc – 12.2.1

rpm – 4.18.0

Chromium – 110

Firefox ESR – 102.8

LibreOffice – 7.5.0

Plasma – 5.26.90

GNOME – 43

Xfce – 4.18

LXQt – 1.2.1

mesa – 23.0

A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the installation media. Do note that despite current version freeze there will be still updates to the beta 1 released packages. Mostly bugs and security fixes.

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.

We continue to offer (as few do) installation media for 32-bit and 64-bit systems, 64-bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32-bit live image for Xfce.

If you missed it in the first Alpha, Mageia now has a new tool for removing old kernels, which will be configured by default and can be found in the “Tools” section of the applications menu.

Join us in Mageia!

Mageia 9 alpha is here already

We are happy to announce the release of the test images of Mageia 9. These are available to early testers to help with the development towards a stable final release of Mageia 9. 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 – 6.0.5
  • glib – 2.36
  • gcc – 12.2.1
  • rpm – 4.18.0
  • Chromium – 106
  • Firefox ESR – 102.5
  • LibreOffice – 7.4.2
  • Plasma – 5.25.9
  • GNOME 43.1
  • Xfce 4.17
  • LXQt 1.2.0

 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 8, 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.

The Control Centre now adds a new feature that will allow the removal of old kernels. This feature will be automated by default in Mageia 9, but will also allow the user to configure and run it manually. There are also improvements in boot times with the Plasma update to 5.25 and Systemd.

And as always there are many package updates. So please update during or at least soon after install.

Of course you’re very welcome to join us.