Mageia 6: is it the rise of Phoenix?

There is no secret that I always preferred distributions with the DEB package format. However, there is an exception. Mageia was the distribution that I ran for quite long time on various laptops. Unfortunately, the issues with outdated packages made me leave this distribution behind some time ago.

Just as a reminder, Mageia is an off-spring from the famous Mandriva family that survived when the Mandriva tree crashed.

And to fill out the whole forest, OpenMandriva is another off-spring, and my recent test showed that it is far below the mother quality.

Coming back to Mageia, it has been a long time since the previous version of this operating system was released. Mageia 5.0 was the “most recent release” for 1.5 years, and 5.1 was merely an update to it.

Mageia 6 was released just few weeks ago, in July 2017. It is a good time to check it out now.

You can get this Linux operating system from many mirrors or via torrent. There are 64- and 32-bit install images for both GNOME and KDE, as well as Live images with the same desktop environments available for 64-bit computers only. I downloaded the ISO image of Mageia 6 KDE 64-bit Live, which is 2.4 GB in size. Then I "burnt" that ISO image onto the USB stick using the dd command and plugged it into my Dell Inspirion 17 laptop.

Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

4 categories of Linux distributions

There are different Linux distributions. If you just go to Distrowatch site, you will find hundreds of them listed there. Some of them even have my reviews listed. And how many distributions are NOT listed? Some of them either fail to gain registration on Distrowatch, or are in the process of that, like Zorin OS was just few years ago.

However, there are at least four distinctive categories of distributions visible in the Linux world.

Mageia 5 KDE: quick screenshot tour

Mageia 5 is a distribution that many people where waiting for. Initially scheduled for November 2014, it was finally released on the 19th of June 2015.

Let's have a look at this distribution with a quick screenshot tour. This is not intended to be a full-scale review, just a quick glance.

Ruth Suehle: Red Hat and Fedora derivatives and forks are part of the community

No one will argue that Linux world is more fragmented than the worlds of other operating systems. Each distribution has its fans, developers and haters.

There are few companies among this ocean of distributions that work closely with the community and help the Linux world to improve. Would it be interesting for you to see what people in these companies think like? Let's talk to one of them!

Let me introduce: Ruth Suehle!

To upgrade or not to upgrade?

You may know that my current laptop Sony VAIO VGN-NR21Z has 4 operating systems installed. Three of them are Linux: Debian, Linux Mint and Mageia.

Debian WheezyXfce sits there as a guarantor of boot stability. It controls the GRUB records. As usual, it is a rock solid distribution without much fun in it, although I have an issue with a mounted network drive: like some other distributions before, Debian switches off the wireless network interface before unmounting the shared drive. Thus, the unmounting process hangs for about 10 minutes before the computer can finally shut down.

However, that is not the point of today's article.

Mageia 4 GNOME Quick Screenshot Tour

It was just a coincidence probably, but last week brought us update for two distributions I like very much.
Though I don't use Zorin OS personally, I like their approach in popularization of Linux. You have probably seen my Quick Screenshot Tour for Zorin OS 8 Core already.
Mageia in opposite is one of the permanent tenants on my laptop. I like this distribution very much, enjoying it even with some bugs I encounter. It is time now to have a Quick Screenshot Tour for Mageia 4 GNOME.
(Attention! Heavy graphics!)

Pre-order your personal copy of Mageia 4 DVD

You may be aware that the newest version of Mageia 4 will be released on the 1st of February 2014. I am happy tell you that pre-ordering of disks with this distribution is now open!

You can pre-order your own copy of Mageia 4 right now. It means that a DVD with your favourite OS will be burnt for you as early as possible, and dispatched on the day of release, or soon after. Dispatched to anywhere in the world.

How you can get the DVD? Go to http://buylinuxcds.co.uk site, purchase the Mageia DVD from there, and in the PayPal comments state that you want version 4. That's easy.

To help you even further, here is a mini-shop that you can use straight away. It supports PayPal checkout, similar to Buy Linux CDs site. And you even don't need a PayPal account to pay - you can do this with your credit a debit card! T&Cs from Buy Linux CDs site apply.

UK (2.00 GBP): Mageia 4 pre-order (UK) Variation GNOME KDE

USA (5.50 USD):

Mageia 4 pre-order (USA)
Variation GNOME KDE

Other countries (3.50 GBP):

Mageia 4 pre-order (Other countries)
Variation GNOME KDE

And yet another alternative: you can purchase the same disks via eBay.

Experiences of a software consultant with various Linux distributions

I like reading comments under the posts of my Linux blog.

Some of these comments are short. Some of them are extended to several paragraphs. And some of them deserve a separate post. That's why I decided to re-publish a comment by Balaji Neelakantan to the post "What would be my own ideal Linux distribution?" as a separate story. 

I hope you will enjoy. Fasten your seatbelts! Let's go!

What would be my own ideal Linux distribution?

There was a question addressed to me recently, after publishing the "Divergence in the distros" article. The person asked me

You tested many distros so you maybe have some pros/cons seen on distros to share.

That made me think about the most perfect distribution I'd like to get, ever. Let me share these thoughts with you.

Anne Nicolas: Mageia project is a viable and mature

"This is a good time for the next interview", DarkDuck thought. And there was a good reason for it.

DarkDuck's favourite distribution Mageia has just jumped into the version 3.

Let's cut this story short. My today's guest is Anne Nicolas, the chairperson of Mageia.org association.

Tux moves house... again!

Does Tux really like to move house?

I've written about this already, when I first changed the HDD in my laptop. I moved the same HDD from an HP Compaq C300 to a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pi 1505. The HDD had 4 operating systems installed: Windows XP, Mageia 1 KDE, Linux Mint XFCE and Debian Squeeze. I made a conclusion at that time that WinXP survived the move the best.

The list of operating systems installed on that HDD have changed a bit since then. Linux Mint Xfce has gone, and Xubuntu 12.04 arrived in its place. Mageia 1 got upgraded to Mageia 2. Windows XP and Debian only got security updates, but remained at the same version level.

Unfortunately, the Fujitsu-Siemens laptop did not last long. Less than 1.5 years in my hands, and the backlight on the screen went bust. To be honest, the laptop had been used by somebody else before, so the actual lifespan of the device was significantly more than 1.5 years.

What was inside the Fujitsu-Siemens?

• Intel Centrino, dual core 1.73 GHz
• 1GB RAM
• CD/DVD-RW
• Intel video card
• Intel 3945ABG WiFi card

After the backlight failed, I set myself the task of buying a new laptop. My choice was a Sony VAIO VGN-NR21Z. Of course, it had also been used by someone else, but it was described as "in very good condition".

What does this laptop have?

• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.1 GHz
• 3GB RAM
• CD/DVD-RW
• NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT GPU
• Intel 4965 AGN WiFi card

Just a few words about the design of devices. I mentioned in my previous article that it took me much more time to put the HDD into the Fujitsu-Siemens laptop than to take the same HDD out of HP Compaq. But only now have I realized that the Fujitsu-Siemens was actually well-designed! If you have ever tried to swap the HDD in Sony VAIO VGN-NR21Z, you would know that you need to unscrew literally 2 dozen screws of different sizes just to get the frame with the HDD out. Plus 4 screws more to take the HDD itself out of the frame! Of course, you need to put all these screws back when you are finished! That's real torture!

Anyway, I went through that exercise, and my new Sony laptop is ready for the test. Are the operating systems ready? Let's see!

22 questions to the chairperson of Mageia.org association

Mageia is my favourite operating system. I have never hidden this fact. It became #1 in my personal rating soon after the release of their version 1 in June 2011, and was the sole holder of that place until about November 2011. Although it shares the first place now with Xubuntu, I currently run version 2 and still like it a lot.
That’s why I was over the moon when I got a chance to invite this person into my "interview room".
Please meet: Anne Nicolas!

Mageia 2 GNOME: not that good

Mageia is a distribution forked from Mandriva some time ago. That's not a secret. Also, it's not a secret that Mandriva's preferred desktop environment was KDE. Even the fact that the latest version Mandriva 2011 has only a KDE option proves that position.
At the same time, Mageia continued the old Mandriva strategy, and released their distribution with two options: KDE and GNOME.
I have only tried Mageia KDE so far, and had no chance to try GNOME.
But there was an order from BuyLinuxCDs.co.uk site which let me do something new. The customer ordered a CD with Mageia 2 GNOME. I always check my CDs before dispatch, so I finally got a chance to try Mageia 2 GNOME myself.
The ISO image of Europe1-Americas version of Mageia 2 GNOME is 670 Mb in size.
I burnt it onto the CD-R which I intended to send to the customer and inserted that disk into the optical drive of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505 laptop. Reboot. Choose to boot from the optical drive. Let's go!

Mageia 2: smooth upgrade

A few days ago I wrote about my first impression of Mageia 2 KDE from a Live run. I can’t say that it was without issues, but they were not the major ones.

That’s why I decided to upgrade my existing installation of Mageia KDE from version 1 to version 2.

To be honest, I was slightly scared by the previous not-so-good experience of a Mageia upgrade described by Gene on his ERACC blog. The second option for me would be to make a fresh install, which I could always revert to. I had so little to lose that the decision was easily made.

Mageia 2 KDE: first glance

This operating system captured my heart from the very first day I saw it. Unlike its predecessor Mandriva, I felt very comfortable with Mageia.

Mageia 1 was, to a very large extent, a rebranded spin of Mandriva, let’s admit that. The team fixed many things I disliked in Mandriva, and changed the branding. But they did not have enough time to make serious changes from Mandriva. The comparative test of Mageia 1 made by one of my guest authors confirmed this.

After almost a year after the first release, Mageia 2 saw the world at the end of May 2012.

I could not get my hands dirty with the new release for a few weeks because of various reasons, but finally I got the time to try it.

As you may know, Mageia 1 KDE is one of the systems I have installed on my laptop Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505. Therefore, I could simply run an upgrade for my existing system.

But this would not be that interesting. Or, otherwise, this could be too risky.

That’s why I decided to try a Live run of the Mageia 2 KDE operating system first.

You can either download the ISO image file of Mageia 2 KDE from one of many mirrors, or use a torrent. I chose the second option. The ISO image itself is 696 Mb for the Live CD version. The entire downloaded size, though, is 715 Mb, because it includes additional files like MD5 sum.

The official guide says that you can create a Live USB from the ISO using command dd or application mandriva-seed. Unfortunately, neither of them worked for me. The USB stick, created using these methods, was not bootable. The very likely reason, though, is in the BIOS of my laptop.

Unetbootin was slightly better. I was able to see the boot menu and even the splash screen. But after approximately 15 minutes of waiting at the splash screen, I decided to give up. Live USB boot did not happen.

Finally, I burnt the ISO image of Mageia 2 KDE onto the DVD-RW disk.

So, the disk was ready and loaded into the optical drive of my Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505. Reboot. Choose to boot from DVD. Let’s go!

Three greatest successes in Linux world 2011

2011 is coming to its end. It is time to make final roundups and see what happened in our life in this year.
I have written about three greatest failures in Linux world 2011 just now.
Now let's have a look at greatest successes in Linux world in 2011 from my point of view.

1. Debian Squeeze

No doubt, Debian is one of the most respectable, used, contributed, {insert your own} distribution in the Linux world. And this team is famous for their quality. They release new stable system only when they consider it ready, not when deadline comes.
And finally Debian Squeeze was released in February 2011. It is stable, nice and reliable. It now forms part of my own quadro-boot landscape. Moreover, it is very important part of this landscape: I manage my bootloader GRUB2 from Debian.

2. Mageia 1

This distribution was forked from Mandriva somewhere in autumn 2010. Mageia's team was not producing much noise actually while getting their own Operating System ready. And then came June 2011, and we saw a result.
I don't know about you. But as much Mandriva (even previous versions) was a failure for me, that much Mageia became my favourite. It is distribution number one I use. It is default option in my quadro-boot configuration.
This Linux distribution is now ranked 11th in the Distrowatch list, just below Mandriva itself. Not a bad result providing they are only 6 months old!

3. Fedora 15 and 16

Fedora produced two released this year, same as OpenSuSE and Ubuntu (hence many Ubuntu-based derivatives).
And both of them were lovely from my point of view. Fedora 15 was the first distribution to feature GNOME3 as default desktop environment. And it was already awesome, even though not without a glitch. Fedora 16 became even better.
What is about Fedora KDE? As I have written, Fedora 15 KDE was very good, and Fedora 16 KDE was even better.

Mageia, Mandriva and IBM: Battle of Giants

IBM X31

My laptop is very old, so old that many people don’t even remember the model. This is one of the last models designed and actually produced by IBM before it was sold to Lenovo – a good old IBM X31, upgraded to 2Gb RAM at the day of purchase in 2005. There is no single thing it cannot do for me – it works just perfectly for many years, and, perhaps, for a few years to come.

I am also a dedicated Mandriva user since those times when it was known as Mandrake and was one of the two Linux distributions on the market – it means, since late 1990s. True, there were some interruptions in my love story with Mandrake (I cheated on it with Windows for a few years), but apart from that I was true and faithful to this distribution.

So, what was the trigger that made me think about divorcing Mandriva?

Re-settling Mageia and Debian

Those who closely follow my blog already know: I have recently changed my lapop. It was due to unresolvable hardware issue: hinge on the old one became broken.
Old laptop had 4 inhabitants on its hard disk: Windows XP, Mageia 1 KDE, Linux Mint XFCE and Debian Squeeze GNOME.
I wrote about my experience how old installed systems behaved themselves in their new house.
Next task for me was to re-install all Linux systems which I had. I did not plan to re-install Windows XP for two reasons:

• it behaved itself pretty well and did not show any glitches
• I use it too rare to bother.

Another part of the plan was to replace one of inhabitants: Linux Mint XFCE left the league and new Salix 13.37 XFCE joined quadro-boot landscape.
So, I left with 2 more systems to tell you about: Mageia and Debian.
Follow the link to read how they felt during and after re-installation.

What is your best favourite KDE distro?

I have recently received a comment on the post about Pardus Linux, which made me think a lot.

The question in comment was:

What is your best favorite KDE distro? Mageia, Pardus, Kubuntu, Mandriva, PC Linux OS, Mint KDE.... which? :) I will use your choice :) thanks too.

omergex

First of all, I am very pleased that person looks at me as at specialist and asks for advice in system choice. Obviously, that is the point of this blog – to choose OS for your computer. Look at the top of the page to confirm.
Then, I should admit that’s a very good question actually.

Mageia-cal Win Over Humanity

I like Humanity in form of Ubuntu. I like KDE. That's why Kubuntu was my favourite distribution almost from very first sight on it. It was version 10.04 LTS, which I got on official CD from Shipit. You can still order a copy of that CD from Buy Linux CDs site.
Since then I made couple of upgrades: to 10.10 and 11.04.
First upgrade to 10.10 was little bit painful, but tolerable. There were some bugs which needed fixing before system was usable again.
Second upgrade to 11.04 was much worse. No, it does not mean that system became absolutely unusable. But there were 2 bugs which annoyed me a lot.

• First is problem with desktop effects. They are automatically disabled each boot and cannot be brought back on. Kubuntu complains on performance reasons, but I see nothing unusual happening. 
• Second is shutdown problem with network drive mounted. It is the bug described here.

Few months passed since 11.04 release date, and bugs are still here. That made me look into alternatives to both Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

vs.

After some consideration, replacement candidates were found. First is to replace Kubuntu, and it will be Mageia. Second to replace Ubuntu, and it will be... Wait, one step at a time.
So, I decided to move away not only from Kubuntu, but also from .deb-only concept on my PC.
Mageia is a new distribution brought up on the remainings of Mandriva. I have already reviewed Mageia in Live mode, and was more than pleased.
It is time to start installation now! Yes! Let's go!