Contents

Introduction

Mageia 2 marks the milestone of a lot of hard work, that started the day the Mageia distribution was born.

This page should help you get an overview of what Mageia offers its users.

Available installation media

Mageia has two distinct installation media types:

For more information have a look at the installation media page.

You will always find the download info on the Mageia download page; direct (ftp and http) and BitTorrent downloads are available.

The Mageia online repositories

The Mageia software sits in three different repositories/media, depending on the type of license applied to each package. Here's an overview of those repositories:

Major features in Mageia 2

Installer

Generic news

The installer hardware support has been greatly extended.

The minimal install was reduced from 530Mb (Mandriva 20xx.x or Mageia 1) down to 325Mb.

Stage 1

The stage1 is the first part of the installer, booted from a CD, a DVD, a USB key, local hard disk or from the network. Its purpose is to find the second stage, which is either the actual installer or the rescue system.

In Mageia 2, stage1 has the following improvements:

New flavors

Stage1 now comes in two flavors. Eg: for CDs, the traditional boot.iso has a new companion, boot-nonfree.iso.

As in previous releases, boot.iso only contains free drivers & software.

The boot-nonfree.iso includes non-free firmware, needed by some free software drivers to work (notably firmware for network/SCSI/... cards), as well as non-free network drivers.

Stage2

Stage 2 is the second part of the installer. It's the actual installer, either graphical or in text mode. Mageia provides:

Rescue

The rescue system now works better (there were some problems in both Mandriva 2010.x/2011 & Mageia 1). It has support for :

Misc

drakx-in-chroot offers GDB support in order to record installer coredumps, these can then be debugged in a "real" system.

Tools

Memory footprint has been reduced for several tools (eg: harddrake2). Various crashes were fixed. Hardware support has been extended.

drakx-net

The network tools have been adapted to work with systemd. Various small bugs relating to interaction with NetworkManger & firewall management have been fixed. Squid configuration has been fixed when sharing an internet connection (#1353).

XFdrake

XFdrake now defaults to 24bit with QXL virtual cards since 16bit mode doesn't work. Old Nvidia drivers are disabled since they're not supported on newer X11 servers. Support for more virtual gfx cards has been added. Support for IA64 is dropped.

Bug reporting

drakbug now provides better stack traces in case of segfaulting. Collecting this stack frame is quite a lot faster, and also reports the theme used as some crashes came from the theme engine.

Harddrake

Even more hardware is supported.

Unbreakable X11

More explanations are provided when a driver is altered due to proprietary drivers not supporting newer X11 servers. When an incompatible switch is made (eg proprietary driver to KMS driver), a reboot is advised.

Package Management tools

CLI Package Management Tools

RPM has been upgraded to 4.9 which makes several operations faster.

Mageia uses the familiar urpmi. This Command Line Interface (CLI) tool is the default RPM package dependency resolver in Mageia and can be used to install RPM packages. It can also be used to update the system. For full usage details check the urpmi man page.

The rest of the family are:

GUI Package Management Tools

If you're not familiar with, or prefer not to use the CLI, don't worry, Mageia offers a complete set of Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools to manage packages on the system. The main GUI tool is Rpmdrake (Install & Remove Software), available directly from the applications menu/button or via the Mageia Control Center, where it teams up with our other package management tools.

The following tools are available from the Mageia Control Center's (MCC) Software management area:

Mageia system configuration tools

Mageia continues to use all the familiar drak tools:

Available Desktop Environments

As a desktop-agnostic distribution, Mageia has all the popular desktop environments, along with various window managers. Here's an overview:

KDE4

Mageia 2 includes KDE SC 4.8.2. This release brings many improvements and new features. For more details, check the release announcement.

GNOME

Mageia 2 includes GNOME 3.4, with the plethora of popular applications that come with it (Totem, Rhythmbox, Epiphany, Evolution, The GNOME Archiver (file-roller), Evince, F-Spot... etc).

XFCE4

Mageia 2 includes XFCE, with plugins and applications. At the release date it was XFCE 4.9, but updates may come later.

LXDE

Mageia 2 includes LXDE packages (PCManFM, LXSession, LXTerminal, Gpicview, LXRandR).

Razor-Qt

Mageia 2 includes razor-qt packages, its an advanced, easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies.

E17

Mageia 2 includes an updated SVN revision (r69188) of E17.

Window Managers

Mageia 2 includes various window managers, which in reality are just small and very light weight desktop environments:

Desktop Applications

Mageia 2 ships many of the popular desktop applications, here are the highlights.

Web Browsers and email clients

Office

Communications

Instant Messaging

IRC

VOIP

CCTV Security

ZoneMinder is intended for use in single or multi-camera video security applications, including commercial or home CCTV. It supports capture, analysis, recording, and monitoring of video data coming from one or more video or network cameras attached to a Linux system. ZoneMinder also supports web and semi-automatic control of Pan/Tilt/Zoom cameras using a variety of protocols. The stable version, 1.25.0 with performance enhancing updates thanks to Kfir Itzhak, is available in the core and tainted repositories. A quick setup script is included for out-of-the-box operation.

Virtualisation

Graphics

Multimedia Applications

Mageia comes packed with the most famous multimedia applications of all sorts and purposes.

Multimedia Players

[1]Some packages have dual lives, i.e. they exist in both the Core and Tainted repositories:

Pick the one that's more suitable for you, for more info on the criteria used for the repositories in Mageia have a look here.

Multimedia Editors

TV-related Multimedia Applications

Subtitle Editors

IDEs

Base System

X server

Proprietary graphics cards drivers

nVidia 295.49 and ATI (fglrx) 8.961 (12.4) proprietary drivers are available in the Nonfree online repository. Old drivers from Nvidia are no longer compatible with Xorg. Thus they are disabled in MCC. This concerns the 71.86.XX, 96.43.XX and 173.14.XX versions.

Upgrading from Mageia 1

Upgrading from Mageia 1 is supported, and has been fine-tuned over the past few months, so it should work. But as always, it's very advisable to back up any important data before upgrading and make sure you have made all updates of Mageia 1 (such as rpm and urpmi).

There are several ways to upgrade from one of the previous Mageia releases:

Warning: Upgrading an existing install using a LiveCD is NOT supported due to the livecd image being copied "as is" to the target system.


Upgrading via the Internet

The Mageia update notification applet, Mageia Online, will notify you that a new Mageia release is available, and ask if you wish to upgrade. If you agree, the upgrade will be carried out from within your Mageia installation without any further steps being necessary.

If you have disabled the applet or it is not automatically running for some reason, you can upgrade manually either using the GUI (mgaonline) or the CLI (urpmi). Both methods are outlined below.

First make sure you have the latest updates for your currently running release prior to upgrading.

Upgrading online, using mgaonline (GUI)

To upgrade run this command as root in terminal:

killall mgaapplet
mgaapplet --testing

Or

su
mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=2

It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 2 distribution, configure Mageia media sources and start migration.

Upgrading online, using urpmi (CLI)

You can also upgrade using urpmi from your favorite terminal emulator.


Here are the general upgrade steps:

su
urpmi.removemedia -a
su
urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.2.$ARCH.list
(Where $ARCH is either i586 or x86_64)
su
urpmi.addmedia --distrib <media_url>
You can get the mirror_url using the Mageia mirrors web application
su
urpmi --replacefiles --auto-update --auto


Warning: if you are upgrading remotely using SSH, check that UsePAM is enabled in your sshd configuration or your session may be killed in the middle of the upgrade. Check the section about SSH daemon for more information.

Using the Mageia 2 DVD to Upgrade

You can use the Mageia 2 DVD to do clean installs but also to upgrade from previous releases.


To upgrade:


It is recommended that the online repositories be set up, if possible, during the upgrade as the DVD only includes a subset of the complete set of Mageia online repositories.

On the first reboot use the command line 'urpmi --auto-update' to make sure all packages was updated.

Notable changes since Mageia 1

SSH daemon

With SSH daemon, we no longer support using sshd with the UsePAM option set to no. If UsePAM is not set to yes you will be warned in your syslog and restarting the sshd service will likely kill any active sessions. It is recommended that you edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config to check that you have the following line : 

UsePAM yes

MariaDB

Due to MySQL being replaced by MariaDB, after upgrading from mga1, the mysqld service will not be enabled nor started.

Java browser plugin

In Mageia 2, the Java OpenJDK plugin for web browsers has been split to a separate project named iceadtea-web. To install the Java plugin, you need to install the icedtea-web package.

Obsoleted packages

Some packages have been obsoleted in Mageia 2, because they cannot be maintained for various reasons. When upgrading from Mageia 1 to Mageia 2, if you have any of those obsolete packages, they will automatically be removed by the task-obsolete package. In the case where you wish to continue using an obsolete package, you can add task-obsolete to the file /etc/urpmi/skip.list to prevent it from being installed and removing obsolete packages.

Sun Java

Mageia 1 included the proprietary version of Java from Sun-Oracle in the nonfree repository. Due to license changes (the retirement of the "Operating System Distributor License for Java") it is no longer possible to provide new versions of Oracle Java in the repository. It is now recommended you use OpenJDK if you need Java, which is now the official Java SE7 reference implementation. If you need to use Oracle JDK binaries, you can download them from the JRE or the JDK web page.

cluster, heartbeat, openais

cluster, heartbeat and openais packages have been obsoleted. If you need to setup High Availability clusters, it is now recommended you use pacemaker and corosync.

MySQL

MySQL is obsoleted in favor of MariaDB. MariaDB is a drop-in replacement for MySQL and it has a much more open development, thus containing the patches originating from Google, Facebook, etc... as well as more storage engines. All files and servicenames are the same as the mysql package and thus the upgrade from MySQL to MariaDB goes perfectly.

pastebin

This package was unmaintained and not working. You may use the wgetpaste package instead.

k9copy

The project development has stopped.

google-gadgets

Project seems to be dead, with no new versions for two years and no recent commits in their source repository.