Mageia 3 on the loose



Mageia 3 has finally made her appearance. After several delays, Anne Nicholas recently announced the official release of the third version of their Mandriva Linux fork. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm quite enamored with this project for two probable reasons: (1) their Mandrake roots - Mandrake was the Linux that freed me from Microsoft's grip, and (2) I admire the way the project was set up and is running. It's about as open and fair as an organization can be and still be organized. Nevertheless, I've never pulled my punches when covering their work, so I'm sure I can be fair.





New features at a glance

Revamped installer offers more options with improved looks

Urpmi and friends also got cleaned up, new features, and GUI tweaks

GRUB 2 - works with caveats

Better hardware and driver auto-configuration

Easier kernel installations

systemd, journalctl are fully implemented

/usr move completed

Linux kernel 3.8.13

X.Org Server 1.13.4

GCC 4.7.2

KDE 4.10.2 and GNOME 3.6.2

Firefox 17.0.5 (ESR)

LibreOffice 4.0.3

Xfce 4.10, Enlightenment 17, LXDE, and more

STEAM in repositories

In practice



I've been following the Mageia project since its inception and used version 1 for quite a while. I skipped version 2 mainly due to the lack of GRUB 2 support, but have been very excited to test Mageia 3. I downloaded and installed the live KDE DVD version for 64-bit computers. My computer is a basic desktop with a Gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G, Intel Q9400, and GeForce 9800GTX hooked up to two mismatched monitors. Obviously, I did not test UEFI (Secure Boot not supported in Mageia 3, and is, in fact, not a high priority).



While it's better to install from the install media, I, nevertheless, forgot, and used the live DVD. The install procedure was quite familiar and there were some advanced options like Btrfs, encryption, and virtualization, but not as many as the install image. I encountered a small issue at the partitioning stage when the installer identified some empty partitions as Btrfs and would not reformat them. To make things easy on myself I grabbed an empty one at the end of one of my disks, deleted it, and then the installer would re-create, format, and install upon it. Otherwise, the install proceeded as expected until the bootloader phase; not that anything happened, but there were caveats to recall. After I re-read the errata, I decided to put Mageia's GRUB 2 on the root or install partition and, in essence, chainload it.







Mageia 3 - the default KDE desktop

(full image size: 805kB, screen resolution 1280x1024 pixels)



The first order of business is getting my display the way I like it. I have two monitors, one digital and one analog, one with 1920 resolution and the other 1280, one's an Acer and the other an unrecognized unlisted Samsung. So, it's a challenge for every distribution and I never know what I'll get out of the box. In Mageia 3, I used the Mageia Control Center > Hardware > Set up Graphical Server to configure the graphics, but nothing was really accomplished until the end when I clicked OK - then Harddrake offered to install proprietary drivers. Next, I used NVIDIA-Settings to turn on the second monitor and extend my desktop.



After changing the legacy menu, I needed to get back to work. Konqueror, Kontact, and Kwrite are the primary tools I use. It seems another legacy Mandrake issue hanging around in Mageia is ugly fonts. It took some fiddling, but was able to improve on the defaults a bit. It was after a long day of configuration when my computer just shut off. I was confused, but restarted it. Another five minutes later it did it again. After reversing the last couple of configurations, turning off the screensaver eliminated the issue. I never did see anything in the logs about Asciiquarium, but I don't really use screensavers much anymore anyway. <shrugs>



Speaking of logs, dmesg still works, but old friend /var/log/messages has been deprecated for /var/log/journal/gobbly-gook. It was time to meet systemd and journalctl because I have a cranky tv card and the need for dnsmasq. Since SysVInit is gone, how was this going to work? Well, I found enough howtos and questions on forums to get these needed elements working (if a bit hacky right now). As an aside, I was also able to easily configure my FM radio chip in Kradio4 in Mageia. (For comparison, I haven't been able to get it working in Sabayon for several releases.) Things were really coming together. I spent the next few days just working and playing as usual and only had one little niggle still throwing cold water on my feet.



It's a weird little bug difficult to describe, but basically, something happens to Klipper in that it sometimes freezes or appears to freeze everything for a few milliseconds. I turned off desktop effects that are enabled by default and it seems to have decreased. But this bug was so bad in Mageia 1 that I fled back to Sabayon waving my arms and screaming in the night. (I use highlight and paste a lot in my work at Tuxmachines.) I didn't test Mageia 2 because of the GRUB thing, so I'd forgotten about it - until it reared up in 3. But as long as it doesn't freeze up completely, I can live with the occasional delay, maybe.



Developers had to decide what they could include in the live image and what had to be cut. So, I did have to install a lot of things that are normally just there in Sabayon. It's not a big deal, you just might run into the same situation. The new package manager tweaks make it easy enough though. Speaking of which, it was so nice just to click Apply and have the Steam client installed and working within seconds - and then to have Half-Life installed and working wonderfully in a few more. But Akregator and the dictionary plasmoid complain about missing backends when I start them, but nothing similarly named appears in the software manager. I'll have to investigate that more as time permits. Despite that, the applications appear to work just fine without them. I still can't find a decent weather applet, but that's not Mageia's fault - it's Linux-wide.





Anne Nicolas Answers a Few Questions



I wondered about several of the new technologies that are appearing in our distros even as developers continue to struggle to get them functioning properly. The systemd utility has really been taking it on the chin lately and I asked Nicolas in light of their need for more help - do they feel the pressure to adopt new technology before it or themselves are ready? She replied: " Well, it's not about [that] but rather about the capability we have for now to support our own solutions. Since the beginning Mageia packagers have worked together with other distribution maintainers to experience, debug, update... And managing boot process through systemd is part of it. Colin Guthrie is part of the upstream team working on it. Still, we always try to make the best choice for the distribution. So the decision is always a question of finding a well-balanced position between the integration of cutting-edge technologies and efficiency for our users. "



I asked her what the issue in Mageia with systemd was and she replied: " Well, systemd has been integrated since Mageia 2 now. So all the big work was done there. The difference is that Mageia 3 now supports only systemd as the default. In Mageia 2, systemd was already working well and the remaining job was about migrating from old SysVInit script to proper systemd system unit script. "



Next, I inquired about the greatest challenge in getting Mageia 3 out the door and she listed the three biggest issues they would like to see improved next cycle. " Generally speaking fixing bugs is much less appealing than working on new versions. So we suffered from a lack of people working on such things (packagers and QA guys). So we need to work on this so that at some point of the release, people focus on finalizing the current release. We need to explain more how a Linux distribution is driven from the specifications to the final release. We still have many critical bugs reported in the last few weeks before the final release, which is basically much too late to work properly on them. Finally, we have some specific developments included in the distribution, like the installer, all the drakxtools... We had quite a lot of issues because of /usr move, GRUB 2 integration... Very few people can work on these because they know the way it has been developed and work on them for years now. So a kind of bottleneck here. We are already planning to manage this, create a development team and add some tools to help people getting trained on it, like git and gerrit. "



UEFI is working but considered experimental in Mageia 3. Nicolas said that Secure Boot is not required by Microsoft and would not be a priority in the near future for Mageia. On that note Nicolas said: " Regarding UEFI, the implementation is still experimental. Only booting from FAT32-formatted USB disk labeled as MGA3LIVE is supported so far. The grub2-efi package in 'Cauldron' has a README.efi file that may be useful for people willing to test it. "



In what should have probably been the first question, I asked how everybody at Mageia was feeling about now (on the day of the release). She replied: " The first feelings? Probably tired and proud :). The last two weeks have been very long and we did not want to delay any more the final release. So all has been done to add the final bug fixes so that our users can have the best experience of Linux environment. "





In Conclusion



I've used Mageia 3 full time since its release and it's not perfect - but it's darn close. Nothing is perfect and that is so true for Linux. It's a matter of what bugs bug you less. I used Mageia 1 for quite a while and I'll probably hang around in Mageia 3 too. It performs well. It boots really quickly and the desktop as well as most applications are very responsive. Never underestimate the charm of instantaneous results. I have a nice fresh install of Sabayon Linux 13.04 just waiting, but it looks like I may end up not using it.







Mageia 3 - my typical working desktop

(full image size: 2,641kB, screen resolution 3200x1080 pixels)