Contents

Introduction

Available installation media

Mageia has two distinct installation media types:

All ISO images can be either burned to a CD/DVD or dumped on a USB flash drive.

For more information, please have a look at our installation media wiki page.

You will find the different download options on the Mageia 5 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:

Please also note, that on a 64 bit system, the 32 bit repositories are also added. If the nonfree or tainted 64 bit repositories are enabled, the corresponding 32 bit repositories should also be enabled, as they are needed by some packages, such as skype or playonlinux.

Major new features

Installation

Support for Alpha/IA64/PPC/SPARC was dropped.

Stage 1

Stage 2

UEFI

UEFI is now supported for 64 bits installations. Note that if you want to upgrade a previous Mageia installation which is not in UEFI, you have to do a complete installation. Direct upgrade is not supported. Moreover, running mixed UEFI and non-UEFI systems from the same bootloader is not supported (mga#16030).

A lot of work has been done in order for Mageia to install smoothly under UEFI:

For further details on UEFI installation please refer to the wiki page Installing on systems with UEFI firmware.

GPT partitioning

Various fixes were done regarding GPT partitioning:

Hardware support

Automatic partitioning

Automatic partitioning of free available space now assigns much more space to the root partition. Mageia 4 and earlier used to assign up to 12 GB to the root partition, which could be confusing for some end users (as 12 GB can be quickly filled after you've installed some games or several desktop environments).

Mageia 5 now allocates up to 50 GB for the root partition when using the automatic partition (the exact amount is proportional to the disk size, 50 GB being the upper threshold). If you perform an install on a small harddisk (less than 200 GB), you might prefer manual partitioning to allocate more space for your user data (the /home partition).

Grub2 Integration

Grub2 Integration was completed:

Debugging

The installer was improved:

Localisation (l10n) / Internationalisation (i18n)

Manuals

Software translations

New translations have been added, while others were improved. Thanks to our dedicated community of translators for their reliable work.

Package management

New RPM

RPM has been upgraded to 4.12.0.1. See http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.12.0 for details.

New weak dependencies management

rpm-4.12 brings official support for suggests/recommends/enhances/... tags, which differs from the previous implementation we used

As it's a new implementation, old tags were renamed (eg: RPMTAG_SUGGESTS => RPMTAG_OLDSUGGESTS) and new tags were introduced (eg: RPMTAG_SUGGEST)

Our packages now use the (new) Recommends: tag instead of the (old) Suggests: one. Accordingly urpmi options have been renamed (eg: --no-suggests -> --no-recommends.

Urpmi will handle both old Suggests (as inserted by rpm < 4.12) & new Recommends tags (as inserted by rpm-4.12+). However, packages built with "Suggests:" with rpm-4.12 would use the new suggests tag which will be ignored by urpmi.

Mapping table:
rpm < 4.12.0 (old names) rpm >= 4.12.0 (new names)
RPMTAG_RECOMMENDSNAME ​ RPMTAG_OLDRECOMMENDS​NAME
RPMTAG_SUGGESTSNAME RPMTAG_OLDSUGGESTSNAME
n/a RPMTAG_RECOMMENDNAME
n/a RPMTAG_SUGGESTNAME

The format of the synthesis files in media has been slightly changed. For mga5+, there are now "@recommends@" lines instead of "@suggests" ones.

New dependencies generators

For some time, RPM has supported two ways to generate dependencies when building packages:

Most distributions have switched to the new "internal" generators but Mageia 4 and earlier used the old 'external' generators.

Mageia 5 uses the new "internal" generators. This brings many advantages, e.g.:

For further details read:

As a side effect, the dependencies excluding mechanism has been changed. It's extensively documented here

perl-URPM & urpmi

A hard-coded limit was fixed which prevented updating mga4 to mga5 due to some packages having a provides list longer than 64k characters.

Gurpmi will now run drakbug when it crashes or segfaults, in order for us to get meaningful bug reports.

Tools

Authentication

ManaTools preview

ManaTools is a generic launcher application that can run internal or external modules, such as system configuration tools.
ManaTools is also a collection of configuration tools that allows users to configure most of their system components in a very simple, intuitive and attractive interface. It consists of some modules that can be also run as autonomous applications.
ManaTools started as a port of MCC (Mageia/Mandriva Control Center) to libYui (Suse widget abstraction library), but its aim is to give an easy and common interface to develop and add new modules based on libYui.
Every module, as well as ManaTools itself, can be run using a QT, Gtk or ncurses interface.

Available tools are:

Other

389-Directory Server

The 389 Directory Server is a high end LDAP server 

 389-ds-base 389-ds-console 389-admin 389-admin-console-doc 389-dsgw 389-admin-console 389-ds-console-doc 389-console 389-adminutil

Kolab Groupware Server

Kolab is a secure, scalable and reliable groupware server. It is formed by a number of well-known and proven components and adds intelligent interaction among them. There's a web administration interface, management of free-busy lists and resources, synchronization for several devices and more. Various clients can access Kolab, among them "Kontact" (KDE), Outlook (Windows) and Roundcube (Webmail). Best of all, Kolab is Free Software, so you are free to use, study, share and improve it. http://www.kolab.org/about

Base system

Kernel & hardware support

All hardware managed by kernel-3.19 is enabled.

Wacom tablets should work better during installation. Moreover, Synaptics touchpads should now work during install bug 11524.

Proprietary Nvidia drivers

Recently, NVIDIA dropped support in their latest driver for the following range of chips: GeForce 8xxx, 9xxx and 100 to 415.
As a result, a new nvidia package had to be split out for those cards; it is now called nvidia340. Integration for this has been added to drakx11/XFdrake so the usual auto-detection for the correct driver should work again.

This means there are now three Nvidia proprietary drivers:
nvidia304 for Geforce 6xxx and 7xxx cards
nvidia340 for Geforce 8xxx, 9xxx and 100 to 415 cards
nvidia-current for Geforce 420 and later cards

If you perform an upgrade, the X.org config will be automatically fixed by the harddrake service on first boot.

init system

Graphical environments

MageiaWelcome

X Window System (X11)

Mageia 5 ships with X.Org 1.16.4.

KDE

KDE 4.14.3 & Plasma 5.1.2 are provided.

It has a specific Live-DVD or can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

GNOME

GNOME 3.14 is provided.

It has a specific Live-DVD or can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

For those prefering good old GNOME2, GNOME3 also provides a "Gnome Classic" session.

LXDE

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

XFCE

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer) or the Dual-arch DVD ISO.

LXQT (replacing RazorQt)

LXQt is the successor of RazorQt. Upgrading from Mageia 4 to Mageia 5 will replace RazorQt with LXQT. For more details also check the Errata entry
It cannot be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer) as there is simply not enough space to include all desktop environments and the packages they depend upon.
Online media need to be added to enable selection during initial installation - this is explained in installer documentation

Mate

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

Cinnamon

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

Enlightenment

It comes in its E18 latest version based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.

Light window managers

Mageia 5 also provides a plethora of small and efficient window managers such as afterstep, awesome, dwm, fluxbox, fvwm2, fvwm-crystal, i3, icewm, jwm, lightdm, matchbox, openbox, pekwm, sugar, swm, windowmaker.

Office apps

Libreoffice has been updated to 4.4. See official release notes for details.

Games

In the Mageia community, our love for free software extends to open source games. A huge effort has been made during the Mageia 5 release cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 5 a very good platform for intensive and casual gamers alike. You can check Mageia App DB to see a list of all the new and updated games in Mageia 5. The following section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game category.

New in Mageia 5

The following list is non-exhaustive.

Updates spotlight

The following list is non-exhaustive.

Gaming platforms and tools

Mageia comes with a set of nice gaming platforms and tools, among which:

Education

Mageia 5 still comes with gcompris which is based on the GTK+ toolkit. We were [1] among the donors in February, 2015, to improve the graphical interface. So stay tuned; we may have some really cool stuff coming together with a Qt based version.

Software Development

GCC has been updated to 4.9.2, GDB to 7.8.1 and Valgrind to 3.10.1. Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions, such as Qt 5.4.0 and GTK+ 3.14.8. An important work has been done to simplify the Java stack which was hard to maintain in Mageia 4.

Python3 has been updated to 3.4.3, and when possible, all Python modules are provided for Python 2 and Python 3.

KDE Frameworks 5

Mageia 5 brings KDE Frameworks 5 version 5.5.

Miscellaneous

Upgrading from Mageia 4

Please also read the known issues page.

Upgrading from Mageia 4 is supported, and has been fine-tuned over the past few months, so it should work. But as always, it is very advisable to back up any important data before upgrading and make sure you have made all updates of Mageia 4 (such as rpm and urpmi). Upgrading from Mageia 3 or another distribution is not supported.

If 3rd party repositories, such as Google, have been added during the use of Mageia 4, be sure to make a backup/copy of /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg.

There are several ways to upgrade from Mageia 4:


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

If you want to upgrade a previous Mageia installation which was NOT in UEFI, towards an UEFI-mode Mageia 5, you have to do a complete installation. Direct upgrade is not supported.


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.

Fully update your system before starting upgrade.

Upgrading online, using mgaonline (GUI)

If you do not see that mgaonline notifies you that there is a new release, check your options with mgaapplet-config

Or

su
mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=5

It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 5 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 --replacefiles --auto-update --auto

Using the traditional Mageia 5 DVD to Upgrade

You can use the traditional (so non-Live) Mageia 5 DVD to do clean installs but also to upgrade from Mageia 4.

To upgrade:

It is recommended that the online repositories be set up during the upgrade as the DVD only includes a subset of the complete set of Mageia online repositories. This is especially important if you use important 32bits packages in an otherwise 64bits install, because the 64bits iso will only contain the 64bits packages, so the upgrade is likely to fail if you do not add online repositories.

Moreover, it is possible that Mageia 4 may have received an update to a later version of software than that available on the ISO. When this happens, the upgrade may fail to complete. Since, at the time the ISOs are tested, it is impossible to anticipate which Mageia 4 packages may be updated in the future, offline upgrades (i.e. upgrades attempted without setting up the online repositories) are not supported.

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

Known issues

See the Errata page.

Bug reporting

We have a bug tracker, but please read the Errata before reporting any bugs. If you don't already have a Mageia account, you can create one on https://identity.mageia.org/. If you don't know, see how to report a bug.

Obsoleted packages

For more details on other packages that have been dropped since Mageia 4 release, please have a look at logs or details of the task-obsolete package in our Subversion repository.