Mageia 2

Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux, supported by a not-for-profit organization of recognized and elected contributors.

Forking Mandriva Linux? Yes.

Forking an existing open source project is never an easy decision to make, and forking Mandriva Linux is a huge task.

It was not an impulsive decision. We all spoke a lot before: former employees, Cooker contributors and users' communities. We collected opinions and reactions in the past weeks as we needed to get some kind of global agreement and to gather, before going ahead.

We believe a fork is the best solution and we have decided to create a new distribution: Mageia.

New grounds.

Mageia is a community project: it will not depend on the fate of a particular company.

A not-for-profit organization will be set up in the coming days and it will be managed by a board of community members. After the first year this board will be regularly elected by committed community members.

This organization will manage and coordinate the distribution: code & software hosting and distribution, build system, marketing, foster communication and events. Data, facts, roadmaps, designs will be shared, discussed through this organization.

We will discuss and lay down details in the coming days.

Mageia distribution will be what the board makes it to be, with the help and contribution of the whole community. We already have ideas and plans for this distribution; we want to:

 * make Linux and free software straightforward to use for everyone;
 * provide integrated system configuration tools;
 * keep a high-level of integration between the base system, the desktop (KDE/GNOME) and applications; especially improve third-parties (be it free or proprietary software) integration;
 * target new architectures and form-factors;
 * improve our understanding of computers and electronics devices users.

You certainly have your ideas too. We will take the time to share these.


Product's homepage

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

Installation:
· Work is in progress to decrease size of minimal install

Base system:

kernel:
· The current version is 3.1.2 and comes with...

· backported ASPM patch to improve battery life.
· Improved graphics for the Intel hardware.

systemd:
· systemd integration is in progress and still not finalized. So you may get some side effects. Have a look on meta bug to check reported bugs: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2120

· speedboot is now disabled as it was doing pretty much the same as systemd for boot speed

Others:
· glibc: update has been done before release and we use now 2.14.1

Graphical environments:

KDE:
· Alpha 1 is providing 4.7.3 version

Gnome:
· Alpha 1 is coming with Gnome 3.3.2

LXDE:
· An updated LXDE desktop can be used installing the task-lxde meta package.

Artwork and design:
· New artwork is not yet integrated in this early stage of Mageia 2. But Mageia has switched from Ia_Ora to Oxygen theme for KDE and oxygen-gtk for GNOME. It will still keep consistancy between gtk and Qt applications.

· Still we have some issues pending that will be fixed in coming weeks, especially using gnome-shell.

Games:
· Lots of new games avalaible, and are easy to install just selecting the task-games meta package.