As promised, the first ISO of Mageia, Alpha 1 (code name Cantine) should be available soon on a mirror near you (or rather, on a mirror on the same planet as you): 32 bits DVD iso and 64 bits DVD iso (live CD will come for next releases). Another piece of good news, we have put all the rpms on the mirrors so fearless developers and testers can do an upgrade from their Mandriva Linux 2010.2 systems. (You may try upgrading from Cooker, but be aware of the various rpm5 issues). Anyway, Mageia will only guarantee upgrading from 2010.2 for the final release, so upgrade from Cooker at your own risk!).

As explained in a previous blog post, this development release should not be used in production. It’s not for regular users and not for reviewers either: it is not ready for that at this point. For now, it is mostly directed to Mageia contributors.This is the very first alpha release of Mageia and a kind of preview of it. This is the result of 2 months of hard work, setting up the Build System and cleaning packages and softwares, as explained in this blog post. That’s why you will not find all your favourite applications available (yet :)). Packages are imported one by one and progressively after some cleaning. That’s also why you may find some part of the system quite rough, or not as pretty as expected. The new design is not fully integrated yet and we have many temporary images and icons that will be replaced in the coming weeks for the final release. The Artwork team is working hard on it, and already produced a significant part of the work as you can see in the installer and the graphical boot theme.

We know that this release may not impress you that much, nor will it bring anything revolutionary for the moment and this is not one of our goals yet; as we first plan to have a rock solid factory and system.

Releasing this first ISO as it is now means that:

We have our own repositories ready, with cleaned up packages and our own policies (software media changes, management of licenses);

We have our own build system up and running (and it’s running rather well);

Packagers are working hard, and about 4800 packages, updated, made it through the build system;

We did bootstrap our own distribution;

We got a working ISO to run and install;

We have a basic working operating system.

In a few words: the power switch is on, the factory is working, teams are organized and all this enables us to deliver a minimum working product, in its first form.

Since the first goal for this release is to get feedback, we have set up a bug tracking system (don’t worry about the Firefox warning about “This Connection is Untrusted”, this is due to our self-signed certificate). You can register an account which will enable you to log in our Bugzilla ( is our central authentication solution). People can also send feedback on the mageia-discuss mailling list, even if we would prefer to use the bugtracker as this will make our work of tracking problems much easier. Please have a look before on Errata.

You can get the list of mirrors on the brand new mirror-managing web interface. The interface is also quite rough, so do not hesitate if you wish to help improving it.

While the release of the first iso is an important milestone, this is just one of the first steps of the long journey, that started some months ago, with the initial announcement of the project. We all hope to be able to prove with this iso that the project is indeed in a quite good shape, and hope you will join us on the Mageia boat toward your next Linux distribution! 🙂

After this alpha release, our next goal is to refine this product to a stable, pleasant release; that is due by the beginning of June, with several other intermediary (Alpha, Beta and RC) releases expected along the way:

Alpha 1 on February, 14th;

Alpha 2 on March, 15th;

Beta 1 on April, 5th;

Beta 2 on April, 26th;

Release Candidate on May, 17th;

Final release on June, 1st.

Enjoy first Mageia tests and see you for next release!