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First impressions of Mageia Linux
MAGEIA, the plucky fork of the Red Hat based French and Brazilian Linux distribution Mandriva, was released on 1 June.
We know that Mandriva went through a financial restructuring late last year, and that most of the employees of its subsidary Edge-IT were suddenly laid-off. On 18 September, 2010 a group announced the fork of Mandriva to a community driven distribution called Mageia. They explained that they "do not want to be dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company." So Mageia can be regarded as the non-corporate version of the Mandriva distribution of Linux.
We caught up with Patricia Fraser, who is the communications team representative on the Mageia community council, and she graciously responded to a few questions.
As to how Mageia got started, Fraser said, "Our founders came from the Mandriva distribution, and our community followed them. We all liked the basis of the distribution, the thinking behind the technology, the flexibility and strength of the tools and we wanted to join the founders in putting that firmly into a community framework."
Perhaps in reaction to the events that led to its founding, Mageia's philosophy apparently is to be directed by its community in a fairly flat organisational structure. Fraser continued, "We’re completely community-based, with everything that implies. Our organisation is community-driven. No arbitrarily-appointed management can dictate the path Mageia will take. An ordinary Mageia user can have more say in the future of this distribution than anywhere else."
The all-volunteer Mageia community has made significant progress in a short period of time to put out its first release. Fraser explained, "After the first nine months, building towards our first full release, we’ve achieved quite a lot. Our community is growing all the time, not just in numbers but in cohesiveness. We have working teams, and lots of cross-pollination between them".
The Mageia community is still looking for volunteers to swell its ranks, and Fraser went on, "Being a contributor is great fun, and the environment is inclusive and supportive. There’s plenty of room for contributions of all kinds, from packagers through system admins to artwork and communications - and even donations!"
While Mageia is just starting out, its obvious that its community is enthusiastic and open to welcoming new members to contribute in all areas. Fraser expressed that enthusiasm and the hope that people will test out Mageia and get involved, saying, "We’d like to encourage people to try Mageia, join the community and talk about what they'd like to see in future releases, join the teams and help bring their ideas to reality for the next release."
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I swear the name gets closer to "mangina" every time it forks.
I downloaded it and installed it under VirtualBox. I found it rather sluggish. Watching videos on youtube was impossible - Ubuntu 11 was much better.
The default colour scheme is a bit wierd. I don't have aproblem with the blue, but the scrollbars are dark on a light background - which meant I kept grapping the light color to move about. Not good UI testing.
Otherwise, what is there to distinguish it from any other Linux distro? It works, but I can easily pass on it.
Forks!
I'm also not a friend of forks. But Mandriva S.A. forced the community to fork Mandriva and therefore I'm really glad that they did.
Yes, there are more than enough distributions. But those who complain didn't read why Mageia was founded. It's not because we were unhappy with the distributions itself but by the management and the uncertainness of its future. What should have we done in your mind?
Greetings,
TeaAge
Given the pattern of failure with Mageia's ancestry, I think I'll just avoid this one.
It are about 320 Linux distributions already. Do the world need any more? I don't thinks so. More competition? Well look how many car brands it was. To many, So some brands are gone. Are it any point to sell like Vauxhall and Opel and the only difference is some cosmetic features? Or Dodge, Chrysler and Plymouth.Same car but different names.And the same will happends with Linux distributions to. Some will survive and others will be gone. I think if Mandriva and Mageia would work as one distribution they would compete better as two different distributions.
My last two desktop PCs have had ATI HDxxxx cards (HD2600 XT and HD4290 respectively) and the graphical installers for both Fedora and Ubuntu have failed to kernel modeset correctly ever since it was introduced (2 years ago?) when I've tried it on either PC.
The trick is to use a failsafe or text installer instead or, if you really want a graphical installer, add "nomodeset" to the kernel command line of the installer (usually it's the Tab key to edit the kernel options).
I don't understand why major distros insist on this kernel modesetting stuff when it's broken on quite a significant range of graphics cards (at least from ATI, possibly from Nvidia too).
"It are already to many and it would be better if some dissapeared or just go togheter with others."
Eh? Huh? Erm. Ugh. Wow. What? Lol.
Me supposeth Engrish be yer n+1-st tongue, whereas n must be more than none?
When you quit working for the company you worked for, you take your own tools. What do you start with after that? YOUR OWN TOOLS!!! There will be much more differentiation in the future. Linux needs competition within itself to compete with proprietary player. Look at what has happened to Ubuntu - it overtook Debian, the distro they had forked out of! Fedora - more popular than Red Hat Linux too! Quantity has a quality of its own. More competition = more ideas to share.
Aplle has already tapped into the F0rce, but they are siphoning it away to power the dark side, by tainting the pure, yet foolish, BSD kernel with proprietary crap on the top of it. Aplle is the exact opposite of what Mageia, and all linux-based distros are all about. Microsoft is not far behind Aplle either.
It is nothing wrong with doing forks, the problem is when you do an exact fork and you only change name and logos.
The guys who created mandriva does mageia now so, if they're not tied to a company anymore.. you can do whatever you like with your fork... won't you?
then why do the same boring thing instead to do your own stuff to that mandriva fork?
Forks are good for eating your food, not for code development.
Majority of forks in OSS so far ended up wasting time reinventing the wheel.
Linux still has a long road ahead when it comes to desktop use.
I have tested Mageia 1 of course. It worked okay, but nothing special about it compared to Mandriva, PCLinuxOS or some other similar avaible distribution. I just think users are getting tired to try all the "new" Linux distributions. I have not seen many reviews of Mageia 1 so far either, I think magazines feel the same as the users in this aspect to. I think Mageia are about 3 years to late with this release...
It are already to many and it would be better if some dissapeared or just go togheter with others.
In the long run I suppose it be only Ubuntu and a few others that realy have a chance to compete with Windows and Apple/Mac.
Hi :) Another interesting article on The Inquirer. Mageia sounds well worth trying already.
Other forks i currently prefer using include Firefox and LibreOffice. I enjoyed Netscape and was overjoyed to see it re-emerge as Firefox and defeating it's old rival. I enjoyed OpenOffice but it was sagging and wilting a bit until TDF took charge and re-merged some of the various off-shoots. Now LibreOffice is a very vibrant community.
It takes a lot of work to get that 1st release out and even more to restructure the organisation especially when the aim is community-led non-hierarchical which are much more robust than business leaders are prepared to admit. Something like double the survival rate in the 1st 2 years apparently. Of course there are struggles with idealists along the way trying to get the balance right and shift of power over to the community at a healthy rate. A struggle that is worth it!
The speed issue of Live Cd/Dvds is about the speed of Cd/Dvd-players that are typically about 100 times slower than normal ide/sata hard-drives. LiveUsbs/Memory-cards are faster! Even the LiveCd/Dvds tend to be faster than a Windows that has been running for a couple of years even if the Windows has been defragged. In gnu&linux we get spoilt because we are used to systems staying fast.
I did enjoy Mandriva ages ago but moved to Ubuntu because it felt better. Mandriva was beautiful tho. Mageia is shaping-up to be much more stable, predictable and more suitable for corporate deployments. It also seems to be fast at developing and has a vibrant, possibly even feisty, community. All good for generating activity! :)
So, i was quite keen to try Magiea but this article has clinched it :) Thanks again :)
Regards from Tom :)
As a comment, DVD content is made only of 100% open source software so you will not find any proprietary drivers inside. Live CDs do contain them. We have to improve communication on it indeed.
... of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork... of UNIX.
How boring.
"No arbitrarily-appointed management can dictate the path Mageia will take."
No? Arbitrarily appointed Forum Nazis won't even allow Mageia community members to mark their own forum threads as SOLVED!
Mageia is NOT community-centric. It's just as "top-heavy" as Mandriva ever was. Arguably, it's even worse.