Mageia Linux Releases Version 1

In September of 2010, Edge-IT was liquidated. The Edge-IT software engineers were part of the Mandriva Linux software team. At that time, the future of Mandriva was in doubt, and many of the layed-off software engineers came together to form Mageia Linux. Mageia Linux is a purely community project, and not tied to any company. It took over a year, but the Mageia community released version 1 just before Christmas. I like Mandriva, so I had to try Mageia.

Mageia Linux is a fork of Mandriva Linux. In 1998, Linux-Mandrake was created as a fork of Red Hat Linux. Hearst Corporation sued over the use of the name Mandrake, which resulted in a change to Mandriva Linux. Along the way, Mandriva created their own repository, which was independent of Red Hat. With its origins tracing back to Red Hat, Mageia is an RPM based distribution. Just as distros that trace back to Debian use Debian (.deb) packaging. There are exceptions to this rule, as openSUSE uses RPM, but SUSE is actually older than Red Hat. While the package manager is the same, the repositories are different.

As a branch of Mandriva, Magiea is still its infancy. The newness of Mageia means that there are still issues to be resolved, as reflected in the following comments.

The Live/Install edition of Mageia is one of the distos that I could not load on my MultiSystem USB stick, as its Live/Install format is not compatible. Consequently, I had to use dd to install the ISO image on a separate USB stick. The big test was to see if I could install Mageia on an external USB hard drive.

The first two attempts to install Mageia failed, with an error regarding inability to copy files to the root partition. Under my configuration, the boot partition is a primary partition, and the root partition is a logical partition. On the third attempt, the install went to completion.

I thought I had it made, until I checked the the /boot directory. To my surprise, the /boot/grub directory only contained an example menu.list file, and no other files. I checked the /boot/grub directory on the Live/Install USB stick, and it also contained an empty  /boot/grub directory, except for the example menu.list file. I was about ready to call it quits, when I decided to try and boot Megeia using Super Grub2. The boot was successful, my problem was just the missing files. My external hard drive is actually multibooted, with Lubuntu being the distro linked to by the MBR. To my surprise, os-prober found Mageia, and generated an entry in the Grub menu.

All was OK, until a Mageia update installed a new kernel. Now, I have two entries in the Grub menu, with the same title. Until I have time to fix the /boot/grub directory, or at least build a valid menu.list file, os-prober cannot extract an correct title for the Grub menu entries. I am not quite sure why the Mageia community uses Legacy Grub, instead of using Grub2. While Legacy Grub is stable, it is no longer maintained.

My next challenge was getting the was installing the Broadcom wireless driver required my HP mini netbook. I downloaded the driver, and rebooted. Mageia now recognized my wireless network. I maintain a secure network, and I set the key in the network manager configuration. Even though it has the key, I have to enter the root password to access the wireless network after each reboot. Changing the setting to allow users to control the network interface did not make a difference. While it works, it is annoying to have to constantly enter root’s password to activate the network. After the update installed a new kernel, I checked the repository for an updated Broadcom driver. The driver was the same release, so I decided to reboot to see what happened. While reading the boot message, I saw that Mageia copied the driver to the new kernel. Kudos to the Mageia team.

I use Google Chrome as a browser, and not Firefox. I downloaded Google Chrome from Google, and when I opened the download rpm package, the package manager installed it along with the required dependencies. I checked the Internet menu, and saw nothing. The menu is rather long, and there was a More option at the bottom of the menu list. When I selected the More option, there was Google Chrome as the only entry, as shown in the following screen shot:.

It is a long path to load the browser, so I added it to the Favorites menu. One of these days, I will replace Firefox with Google Chrome on the bottom panel. When I installed other applications, I noticed that they are always installed in the More menu option. At this rate, the Favorites menu is going to be long. There has to be a better solution.

I am not sure why, Mageia still uses kernel version 2.6.x. Of the seven distros of Linux that I have installed in the past few weeks, Mageia is the only one that is not using kernel version 3.x. On the positive side, the kernel is optimized for the desktop environment. Without going into details, the desktop kernel biases the scheduler in favor of streaming applications. Thus, movies play without interruption.

Of the issues that I have encountered, the missing files in /boot/grub directory is the only show stopper for most users. I only used the Live/Install edition, so do not know if this problem appears in the Install edition. I may have to download it, just to get the missing files. Except for this issue, I think the Mageia community has done a great job for their first release. I look forward to seeing how the distro matures.