All grown up and ready to go dancing: Mageia 3′s out!

We still can’t believe how much fun it is to make Mageia together, and we’ve been doing it for two and a half years.

For people who can’t wait, get it here; release notes are here. To upgrade from Mageia 2, see here.

business_cardBefore we get to the rest of the information: we dedicate this release to the memory of Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration to those he left behind. We miss his brilliance, his courtesy and his dedication.

 What’s new in Mageia 3?

You can take a look at the complete list of packages upgraded from Mageia 2, by checking the Mageia Apps Database:

Major new features

  • Updates to RPM (4.11) and urpmi, which has been given a good Mageia turnout and cleanup
  • Kernel 3.8
  • systemd 195
  • GRUB is the default bootloader; GRUB2 is available to test.
  • Revamped package groupings for installation and rpmdrake
  • KDE 4.10.2
  • GNOME 3.6.
  • Xfce 4.10
  • Libreoffice 4.0.3

AND: Steam for linux!
See the Release Notes and Mageia App DB for the complete list.

Why choose Mageia?

Community

We all work together – to make the best distribution we can, and to help each other. Come and join us, and make some of the best friends you’ll ever meet – on IRC, on the Forums, in any of the teams, on Google+ , on Facebook – or follow us on Twitter.

Open Support

Mageia’s bug reporting system is open to everyone, as are the mailing lists and community support. That makes it easier for you to have your voice heard and follow what is happening. And access to our fully tested and prompt security updates is free of charge for everyone.

Looking good!

You’ll notice that we have updated our logo! Thanks to Nicolas Duval for this great design. Still Mageia, still the cauldron, but with a real Mageia quirk…

logo_mageia_final2

logo_mageia_final

Thanks again to Leo for our great new background. Mageia’s Atelier team hopes you’ll like our new look as much as we liked making it.

Mageia 3 artwork

We couldn’t do it without…

Our heartfelt thanks go to all the people who donated their time to make this release possible, and all the people who donated money allowing us to buy the servers that we use to build the distribution.

All of us Mageians have been depending on Gandi and Ielo, who have been quietly sponsoring Mageia since the begining of the project. Gandi has been providing us machines on their cloud infrastructure that we use to host the blog and the website. Ielo has been providing space in their datacenter, and the network connection, to host all our other servers that we use for all the Mageia infrastructure such as the packages build system, bug tracker, mailing lists, main mirror, etc… Thank you!

Welcome to Mageia 3!

Mageia European tour 2013

Mageia will be present at the major European Linux events this year, as we have done in previous years.

We have already attended FOSDEM, where we held our general assembly.

In the coming weeks, the tour will go on.

The first event will be Linuxtag in Berlin (Germany). Linuxtag is the leading Open Source and Linux event in Europe. This year is the 19th Linuxtag and the 7th that will take place at the Berlin fair grounds. Linuxtag will take place from May 22nd until May 25th.

Mageia will have a booth there, where we will present the project and the brand new Mageia 3 release. You will have the chance to meet us there, and ask us any questions about the project you always wanted to ask!
As usual, we will have a Mageia dinner on Friday evening. If you want to join us there, just come by our booth and ask us about the place and time.

After Linuxtag, we will be at Solutions Linux in Paris (France), which will take place on May 28th and May 29th. You will be able to meet some of the supporters and developpers of your favorite distribution and get some goodies like tee-shirts or stickers… and of course discover Mageia 3 release!

And that’s not all! Mageia people will also attend RMLL in Bruxelles (Belgium), which will take place from July 6th to July 11th at the ULB.

And then we will be at FrOSCon on August 24th and 25th. FrOSCon is organized by the students of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg near Cologne (Germany).

The last event of this year’s tour will be OpenRheinRuhr on November 9th and 10th at the industry museum in Oberhausen (Germany).

Mageia Days – meeting each other in person

On a daily basis, the Mageia community uses a variety of communication tools such as mailing-lists, IRC and forums. In addition to our online presence, we think we definitely need to have direct meetings so that Mageia people can meet each other and speak directly. Knowing each other better in real life can help our daily communication to work better.

So: we are planning 2 Mageia days during RMLL in July. These days will be dedicated to discussions around Mageia’s organization and the forthcoming release. Here are the proposed topics:

  • Technical specifications for Mageia 4
  • Mageia organization: how to improve our current organization?
  • Managing relationships with local communities
  • Packaging training for beginners
  • Bug triaging for beginners
  • QA for beginners
  • Working on Mageia visibility

We are checking at the moment how many people could be around to participate. The date would be 8th and 9th of july in Bruxelles.

If you are interested in it please add your name here:  Mageia Days on the wiki

Downloading SRPM build requires using urpmi

Several Linux distributions have specific commands to download build requires of a package. For example, Debian and its derivatives have apt-get build-dep; in OpenSUSE is zypper si -d; Fedora have yum-builddep; etc.

There is in Mandriva and derivatives distros using  urpmi a command to do this too!  But it is mandatory to link the package SRPM source.

The command is:

urpmi –buildrequires <package.src.rpm>

Remember, there are two hyphens in buildrequires option. You must to substitute <package.src.rpm> for the src.rpm package address. For example, to download Choqok build requires you uses::

urpmi –buildrequires ftp://mageia.c3sl.ufpr.br/mageia/distrib/cauldron/SRPMS/core/release/choqok-1.3-5.mga3.src.rpm

To find the SRPM package you must visit a repository of your distro and copy the complete package name. For example, there is a Tier 1 repository to Mageia in C3SL, the link is http://mageia.c3sl.ufpr.br/mageia/distrib/cauldron/SRPMS/.

Planned maintenance on Mageia servers this weekend

An important set of Mageia servers will be taken offline this weekend
for maintenance. Ielo.net, a French network provider, has been sponsoring
the Mageia project
by providing hosting for our servers since the beginning
of the project. The room in Marseille where the Mageia servers are
currently located has to be closed, and our servers will be moved this weekend to a
different room in another building. We will take this opportunity to
add more disks to the build system, which are needed to host the new Mageia
releases.

The following services will be unavailable for a few hours this weekend:

The following services will remain operational:

To continue working on the coming release and to contact contributors during the
downtime, please use the IRC channels, as they will be unaffected. A good place
to start is #mageia on irc.freenode.net.

We will update this post to report progress of the operation.

Update: new disks have been added, and servers moved, so everything should be back online. Thanks to maka from Ielo for coming to datacenter on saturday evening and help moving the servers.

New release date for Mageia 3

After some thought and discussions it was decided to delay the Mageia 3 final release until the 18th of May.

We still have some release blocker bugs to fix, meaning bugs which cannot be fixed after release through updates. They are mainly to do with the installer, hardware detection and the installation media.

We could say “Mageia will be released when it’s ready” but we would look like a copycat :)

Packagers and QA team are on the case and doing all the hard work so that you have a great Mageia 3 release!

Thankyou for all your testing and bug reports! We are a community and you are an important part of it. You have helped to make Mageia. Feels good doesn’t it? If you would like to get more involved in making Mageia, please do so.  Take a look here for some ideas, there are all sorts of teams to join and you don’t need to be overly technical to get involved. You would be very welcome..

We are nearly there! Mageia 3 RC is out

We are now 2 weeks from the end of the trip! (at least we hope we will have no delay). Mageia 3 RC release is now available for the very last tests. We need your feedback more than ever.

Mageia teams are working hard to fix the last annoying bugs, what we call release critical bugs. How do we qualify release critical one? All the bugs that cannot be fixed through updates, mainly in the isos installer, the kernel, some of the main drivers…

For more information about this release:

Update 2013/04/26:

Live medias now available, with improved detection of broadcom wireless devices,
UEFI boot support from usb stick on x86_64, …

Distro Recipes 2013: Nice first !

Distro Recipes 2013
As indicated, I had the opportunity to talk during the first Distro Recipes event organized in Paris last week, at the invitation of Hupstream. As Yoann Sculo posted, this was a very interesting day for me, and I really regret I was busy to also attend the first day and the opening.

After a nice welcome breakfast, Aurélien Bompard started by presenting the Fedora distribution.
Aurélien Bompard presenting the Fedora distribution
He did a great job especially expalining how easy it was to become a Fedora maintainer, even if a comparison to Debian revealed that it’s much less different that what people may think (it also takes time to become a packager able to modify most distro packages) and I know by experience that the Fedora packagers are really picky (sometimes for not so good reasons) with new contributions.

After that I talked about HP and Linux distributions. I used in fact the standard HP marketing presentation of the company as a starter (modified of course to suit my needs and include more penguins !) in order to explain the span of our activities, our relationship with communities including distributions, announced that HP will even soon provide firmware for ProLiant servers under a package format (rpm and deb), the fact that HP doesn’t see Linux demand for desktop/laptop on the consumer market (no, it’s not just a price issue that would make Linux more appealing in that case as I justified) but that we do support Linux on some enterprise desktops/laptops. Hopefully this was useful and/or new to some of the audience.

Then Dodji Seketeli made the type of talk making you believe that you could contribute to gcc ! Of course, when he details how much time it took him to add some of the features of the next stable version, you know you can’t ! Well I at least ;-) Anyway lots of good news and features that make that future version 4.8 expected soon.
Dodji Seketeli on gcc

That conclude our morning sessions, and it was then time to eat !! Especially as we had a great buffet waiting for us as you can see:
Repas midi

In order to avoid a sleepy afternoon, we started right after by a round table with 7 people (!), that I had the pleasure to chair. With a representative of each distribution (Mageia, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Arch, Embedded) and a Microsoft representative, you could expect blood and swords fight ! Not at all, I was surprisingly happy that the elements were clearly exposed, each representative defending their own work rather than criticizing, and finding ways to propose more future joint work. Of course, some subjects such as LSB/FHS lead to more debate, but very constructive and I really enjoyed this time slot as a way to show that differences are an added value ! It was also the opportunity for me to meet with Colin Guthrie and Frédérc Crozat, which I had never met before. These distros should be happy to have such representatives defending them (and the others too of course ;-) ) Finally if you have ideas to share to improve cross-distribution work , consider joining the mailing listdedicated to his topic and start sharing your ideas.

Then it was time again for the remaining presentations. The first was Lucas Nussbaum. Long time Debian Developer, (he is even running for the Debian Project Leader now, vote for him !) he made a convincing picture of the Debian ecosystem, the numerous Web sites that contributors can create to enhance the distribution with stats, infos, Ubuntu correlations, … As usual, Debian appears as a very mature distribution, with a strong Governance, being perl friendly… If I had to change I may well become a debianers. But isn’t it because of the pres, as the morning I was a fedorian ;-)
Lucas Nussbaum pour Debian

The next speaker was a long time Linux enthousiast Pierre Ficheux. In fact back when it was Minitel time (not 2.0) I used his xtel program !! Pierre made a presentation (in english but with the accent ;-) ) around embedded Linux distributions, presenting various way to tailor one for your device (he was using a Raspberry Pi) depending whether you use an Ubuntu, a Yocto generated one or a pure OpenEmbedded linux one. Definitely a good idea to explore for my Pi !
Pierre Ficheux sur Yocto (Open Wide)

And then we had the lightnings talks. Aurélien Bompard was there again for HyperKitty. Too bad it’s devoted to mailan, as I think Sympa would also benefit from such a work, as their archive management (at least on the latest versions I used) could be improved.
Aurélien Bompard pour HyperKitty

I came then again on stage for a project-builder.org presentation (building cross-distro packages for upstream projects) and made a short demo which I think is explaining much more than my slides, so I plan on using it more in the future !

After me, Eric Leblond explained how his upstream project (ulogd2) wasn’t picked up correclty by most distributions and asked for help to improce that.

And final speaker was Nicolas Vérité who made a panel on all mobile Linux distributions, recommending to follow closely Tizen for the future as the main force in this area.
Nicolas Vérité sur Distros Mobile

Too bad it was already over. Anne closed the session and I’d like to thank her for the invitation and the perfect organization of this first cross-distributions vent as a real success. Well done and see you next year hopefully !
Anne Nicolas (Hupstream)


Filed under: Event, FLOSS Tagged: Debian, Distro Recipes, Fedora, HP, HPLinux, Linux, Mageia, Open Source, openSUSE, packaging, project-builder.org, Red Hat

Mageia 3 beta 4 live ISOs are now available

Mageia 3 artworkJust a short post to let you know the Live ISOs for Mageia 3 beta 4 are now being uploaded. Sorry for the long wait for these. We hope they will be worth waiting for!

As always please test them well and report any bugs you find.

We are aware that there is a new issue with the repositories not being added after installing and rebooting. It is a result of a restructuring of the ISOs to better support things like broadcom wifi. It will be fixed for the RC but we thought you have waited long enough! For now, please manually add the medias using Mageia Control Center after you install from a Live ISO.

There is much work to be done before the RC and your testing is crucial so please do give them a try..  Thanks  :)

For more information about this release:

Let’s have a round-the-world party!

Mageia 3 release is coming up in around one month – who wants to join in the celebrations around the world?

We’ll be emailing everyone who registered on the Mageia Communities page on the wiki, but if you’re not on that list, don’t worry – we still want to hear from you!

If you need any help to give your release party a lift – artwork for posters or CDs, for instance – just let us know. And you can also use the comments to this post, the Mageia community on G+, @mageia_org on Twitter, or our Facebook page – or on the mailing lists, forums or IRC.

We’d also love to blog about release parties and events everywhere, and give everyone a chance to see the Mageia folks having a good time in other countries. So, please post or comment if you’re planning an event – or email press@mageia.org, so we can make sure your event is covered.

Let’s have a great time celebrating our third release together!