I'm happy to announce that another distribution has joined LinuxQuestions.org. Please welcome Mageia.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/mageia-97/

I'd like to thank ennael, who helped get the forum setup and will be participating on behalf of Mageia, along with andré2.

--jeremy

Welcome...

D-1

Mageia
|A New Linux Distribution
Paris, September 18th 2010

As you may have heard, the future of the Mandriva Linux distribution is unclear.

Most employees working on the distribution were laid off when Edge-IT was liquidated. We do not trust the plans of Mandriva SA anymore and we don't think the company (or any company) is a safe host for such a project.

Many things have happened in the past 12 years. Some were very nice: the Mandriva Linux community is quite large, motivated and experienced, the distribution remains one of the most popular and an award-winning product, easy to use and innovative. Some other events did have some really bad consequences that made people not so confident in the viability of their favourite distribution.

People working on it just do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company.

Forking Mandriva Linux? Yes.
Forking an existing open source project is never an easy decision to make, and forking Mandriva Linux is a huge task.

It was not an impulsive decision. We all spoke a lot before: former employees, Cooker contributors and users' communities. We collected opinions and reactions in the past weeks as we needed to get some kind of global agreement and to gather, before going ahead.

We believe a fork is the best solution and we have decided to create a new distribution: Mageia.

New grounds.
Mageia is a community project: it will not depend on the fate of a particular company.

A not-for-profit organization will be set up in the coming days and it will be managed by a board of community members. After the first year this board will be regularly elected by committed community members.

This organization will manage and coordinate the distribution: code & software hosting and distribution, build system, marketing, foster communication and events. Data, facts, roadmaps, designs will be shared, discussed through this organization.

We will discuss and lay down details in the coming days.

Mageia distribution will be what the board makes it to be, with the help and contribution of the whole community. We already have ideas and plans for this distribution; we want to:

make Linux and free software straightforward to use for everyone;
provide integrated system configuration tools;
keep a high-level of integration between the base system, the desktop (KDE/GNOME) and applications; especially improve third-parties (be it free or proprietary software) integration;
target new architectures and form-factors;
improve our understanding of computers and electronics devices users.
You certainly have your ideas too. We will take the time to share these.

Community.
We understand the Mageia community as:

users,
makers (designers, developers, packagers, translators, testers, etc.),
advocates.
Those can be individuals, organizations, companies from all over the world.

There are challenges here; so many countries, so many languages, so many cultures, so different needs. And that's great.

We've seen with the Mandriva Assembly experiment that it's not an easy task. We believe we can make it better yet.

Hemmo brothers sisters f open source community
I MMMMMove that name Mageia

to save personal time will stick now on mindows platform
Previous year in inspired msgs some of us write that in Meaven will be used Linux or what ever

In eternity lot of time for developing Simple Christlike Mageia(linux) ideas!

Christlike????
I wish this project well, indeed, I applaud the principle of independence from commercial interests etc. etc. but I think religious references should be left right out of it!

All the very best to Mageia,
Steve.

I do know Mageia. I have heard its name recently on http://distrowatch.com/. I saw there that is s one of top ten popular Linux distributions. But I do not think that fact be true. I think there are more distributions top of Mageia.

I was unaware of that, thanks for the update.

d-1

wow....
welcome to http://www.linuxquestions.org

I have been using Mageia for about 4 months now, and I really like it. Seems to be stable...no issues so far.

I replaced Ubuntu with Mageia when they chose to change the destop to a ribbon (you may like it, I did not). I have no complaints with Mageia!!!

I, too, have been using Mageia for the last 4 months or so. I just upgraded to Mageia 2 (release candidate), and must say that I'm very pleased with their system--and especially with their KDE implementation.

I also switched from Ubuntu, which had me pulling my hair out over their asinine GUI changes. I first switched to Mint, but because their KDE implementation wasn't very good (lots of broken bits and incomplete integration), I sought out another distro. Mageia, so far, has proven quite good. It even works with the crappy Canon/Linux printer drivers! (Ubuntu, Mint, Debian and even many RPM distros don't, generally.)

The one down-side, so far, is simply that MGA still has a few minor "kinks" to work out. I was unable to compile WINE64 with MGA1 due to -devel library conflicts between 64- and 32-bit libraries. I submitted a bug, and was told that they're actively working on an overhaul to fix the problem. It might even be fixed already; I have yet to try the compile, again.

Likewise, a few packages don't include all the dependencies that would make them "ideal," or fully up-to-date. For example, MuseScore (a WYSIWYG score editor with midi support) won't play notes properly unless you remember to install portaudio, too--which I submitted a bug report on, and expect the latter to shortly become a dependency of the former. Likewise, the latest version of MuseScore is 1.2; whereas the one in the repository is only 1.1. (To some degree, outdated packages are to be expected in any non-rolling-release distro.)

In any case, though, I'm thoroughly pleased with Mageia, and foresee a great amount of further "polish" and functionality to be added in the future.

Welcome to LQ, Mageia!

--Dane

P.S. weebo: I suspect that the religious reference was some kind of bad translation into English--perhaps from a language wherein religious references are more integrative than they are in English. I'm just speculating, though; I only bring it up to diffuse a potential conflict over the matter. If I'm wrong, please ignore this paragraph of mine. Thanks.

Thank you, Jeremy

Regards Glenn

I believe that Mandrake and it's forks have been vital to Linux. I imagine with Mageia they have ensured that the building that they work in will not be sold and boarded up while they are still in it. If only we could get a cauldron in the left somewhere when we leave a post while booted to Mageia.

It's used everywhere... HPC, mobiles (android), web sites of all sizes, financial institutions, embedded in all kinds of devices.... the only place where it hasn't got any real grip is desktops.

Don't waste your time answering to a spambot.