Mageia is a Free Software operating system of the GNU/Linux family, which can be installed on computers either as the main operating system, or as an alternative system to one or several pre-installed systems (dual boot). It is a community project supported by the non-profit Mageia.Org organization of elected contributors. Mageia is developed by and for its community of users, and is suitable for all kinds of users, from first-time GNU/Linux users to advanced developers or system administrators.
Mageia 6 is a stable release of the Mageia project, which was developed for over two years before being released officially in July, 2017.
Mageia has two distinct installation media types:
All ISO images can be burned to a DVD or dumped on a USB flash drive. Please note the file and device size limits as, for example, a 4 GB ISO image can be too big for some "nominally" 4 GB USB drives, due to their actual capacity being slightly lower than the marketed one.
For more information, please have a look at our installation media manual page.
You will find the different download options on the Mageia 6 download page: direct (FTP and HTTP) and BitTorrent downloads are available.
The software packages that are included in Mageia sit in three different repositories/media, depending on the type of license applied to each package. Here's an overview of those repositories:
The Nonfree media set is enabled by default but can be disabled, if necessary, during the installation.
The Tainted media set is added by default but not enabled by default, i.e., it's completely opt-in; so, check your local laws before using packages from this repository.
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 (both in Release and Updates flavors), as they are needed by some packages, such as PlayOnLinux or Steam.
Mageia 6 ships with the current LTS (Long Term Support) version of the KDE community's desktop environment, Plasma 5.8. The desktop environment goes together with KDE Applications 16.12 and KDE Frameworks 5.32 (KF5).
All packages of the KDE ecosystem were updated to their KF5 version whenever available. KDE 4 as a desktop environment is no longer available in Mageia 6, as it is deprecated upstream and cannot be efficiently maintained next to its successor Plasma 5. See the detailed section about Plasma 5 further down in these release notes for more details.
DNF (Dandified Yum) has been introduced as an alternative to urpmi in Mageia 6. Mageia is pleased to be one of the first major Linux distributions to offer DNF 2 on release! This version of DNF comes with enhanced problem reporting, advanced tracking of weak dependencies, support for rich dependencies, and more detailed transaction information while performing actions. All fresh installations via the classical and live media will have DNF installed. Depending on the upgrade method, it may need to be manually installed after upgrading to Mageia 6.
To support use of DNF in a desktop environment, a new frontend tool is now available: dnfdragora. This new tool is based on the rpmdrake tool, but offers native user interfaces (UIs) for Qt-based and GTK+-based desktop environments, as well as offering an ncurses frontend for server or cloud environments, as well as for managing packages through an SSH session.
It is now possible to offer third-party free and open source software through Fedora COPR and the openSUSE Build Service targeting Mageia 6 and up. Through COPR or OBS, it is now possible for anyone to easily offer free and open source software built and tailored for Mageia, as well as free and open source software that is broadly compatible with Mageia along with other popular Linux distributions.
See the detailed section about package management further down in these release notes for more details.
Our RPM repositories now provide AppStream metadata. Tools like GNOME Software and Plasma Discover leverage AppStream metadata to provide a rich experience when searching, identifying, and managing applications.
AppStream is a cross-distribution effort for enhancing software repositories by standardizing software component metadata. It provides an application-centric view on package repositories and specifications for things needed to create user-friendly application centers.
See the detailed section about package management further down in these release notes for more details.
The ARM (Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machine) port initiated during Mageia 1 days has been rebooted and completed. The core is available for ARMv5 and ARMv7, which includes Raspberry Pi.
There is no traditional installer for now, and it is still considered experimental, but most of the distribution was built successfully on both architectures (see our ARM status overview for details). The plan is to provide installation images for popular ARM devices in the coming months. There is no ETA for those as of Mageia 6's release.
GRUB 2 is the default bootloader for new Mageia 6 installations, and its integration in the DrakX tools has been greatly improved.
GRUB legacy and LILO are no longer offered as alternatives, as they are not compatible with Mageia 6's default ext4 file format. They are, however, preserved during upgrades from Mageia 5, as they stay compatible with pre-existing file systems (created with Mageia 5 or earlier). More details are available in the "Bootloader" section of these release notes.
Xfce Live DVDs are now available to offer a lightweight, live environment for testing and use on older systems, or for those who prefer a lighter-weight system. These are available as both 32 and 64-bit images, with the 32-bit image taking the place of the 32-bit GNOME and KDE 4 Live DVDs of past Mageia releases. GNOME and Plasma Live DVDs are still available as 64-bit images, and those desktop environments can be installed on 32-bit systems using the classical ISO or through a network installation.
UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support has been greatly improved since Mageia 5, especially regarding the partitioning step. For further details on UEFI installations of Mageia, please refer to the wiki page Installing on systems with UEFI firmware.
The default boot loader (and also the only selectable bootloader during a new install) is now GRUB 2 and no longer GRUB legacy. GRUB legacy has known limitations and does not support:
Since LILO and GRUB legacy are no longer maintained upstream, we only offer GRUB 2 for new installations. For upgrades, we still offer GRUB legacy and LILO if they were previously installed and used. The older file systems did not use the new metadata which GRUB legacy does not support. Legacy bootloaders will not be replaced automatically by GRUB 2 on upgrade; if wished for, it can be done manually post-install via the Mageia Control Center.
GRUB 2 integration within the DrakX tools has been greatly improved to support this change:
For a new Mageia 6 installation (without a Mageia distro upgrade), if you want to use a bootloader other than GRUB 2, such as the Microsoft Windows bootloader, take a look at Retaining an existing third party bootloader and Using an existing bootloader.
If, during installation of Mageia 6, you wish to avoid overwriting the master boot record (MBR) (BIOS), and you have, for example: a hard disk (name /dev/sda), a USB key with Mageia 6 ISO DVD (name /dev/sdb), and another USB key with FAT32 format (name /dev/sdc), a workaround is to install the GRUB 2 bootloader on the USB key with FAT32 format (name /dev/sdc) at this step and when your computer starts, boot on the USB key and load Mageia's Linux kernel.
New translations have been added, while others were improved. Thank you to our dedicated community of translators for your reliable work.
Due to migration to Qt 5 for Mageia 6, changes have been made in localedrake to install Qt5 plugins for the input method platform if the user's desktop is Plasma 5. However, sometimes manual installation is still required:
Gnome now uses Wayland by default. Therefore, ibus is the only supported input method platform.
RPM has been upgraded to version 4.13.0.1.
RPM 4.13 offers key improvements to RPM as a whole, including:
More information on changes from RPM 4.12 (which shipped with Mageia 5) to RPM 4.13.0.1 is available from the RPM website:
DNF (Dandified Yum) has been introduced as an alternative to urpmi in Mageia 6.
DNF is a next generation dependency resolver and high-level package management tool that traces its ancestry to two projects: Fedora's Yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) and openSUSE's SAT Solver (libsolv). DNF was forked from Yum several years ago in order to rewrite it to use the SAT Solver library from openSUSE and to massively restructure the codebase so that a sane API would be available for both extending DNF (via plugins and hooks) and building applications on top of it (such as graphical frontends and system lifecycle automation frameworks).
Mageia is pleased to be one of the first major Linux distributions to offer DNF 2 on release! This version of DNF comes with enhanced problem reporting, advanced tracking of weak dependencies, support for rich dependencies (see the RPM release notes for more on this), and more detailed transaction information while performing actions.
Mageia 6 ships with DNF v2.5.1, along with v2.1.1 of the core plugins and v2.0.1 of the extra plugins.
With fresh installations via the classical and live media, DNF will be installed in parallel with urpmi. Depending on the method used to upgrade to Mageia 6, it may be necessary to install the dnf package to have it available.
For information on how to use DNF, please refer to the wiki page: Using DNF.
In order to offer a user-friendly graphical experience using DNF, Mageia has created a new tool: dnfdragora. This new cross-distribution frontend to DNF offers an intuitive experience for managing packages.
Unlike rpmdrake, dnfdragora offers native user interfaces (UIs) for Qt-based and GTK+-based desktop environments, as well as offering an ncurses frontend for server or cloud environments and for managing packages through an SSH session.
To install the Qt or GTK+ frontends, install dnfdragora-qt or dnfdragora-gtk, respectively. If you wish to just use the ncurses UI, install dnfdragora.
PackageKit has been upgraded and switched to a new backend that dramatically improves the reliability and usability of PackageKit-based frontends, such as Apper (Plasma Desktop) and GNOME Software (GNOME).
The new PackageKit backend is completely independent from urpmi, and can be managed through PackageKit frontends such as Apper or through DNF (which shares repository configuration settings with it).
Our RPM-MD (RPM MetaData) repositories (used by DNF and PackageKit) provide AppStream metadata. Tools like GNOME Software (GNOME Desktop) and Plasma Discover (KDE Plasma Desktop) leverage AppStream metadata to provide a rich experience when searching, identifying, and managing applications.
AppStream is a cross-distribution effort for enhancing software repositories by standardizing software component metadata. It enables an application-centric view on package repositories and provides specifications for things needed to create user-friendly application centers.
See the AppStream website for more information: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Distributions/AppStream/
Starting with Mageia 6, Mock is now supported as a package building tool. Mock allows easy automation of building packages within container environments, and in Mageia, can be used to build Mageia, Fedora, and CentOS/RHEL packages.
For more information on using Mock, please refer to the wiki page: Using Mock.
Starting with Mageia 6, it is now possible to offer third-party free and open source software through Fedora COPR targeting Mageia. Through COPR, it is now possible for anyone to easily offer software built and tailored for Mageia, as well as software that is broadly compatible with Mageia along with other popular RPM-based Linux distributions.
The DNF package manager also has integration with COPR and allows for easy searching, identifying, enabling, and disabling repositories from COPR to use on Mageia systems.
For more information on Fedora COPR, please refer to the wiki page: Fedora COPR
Starting with Mageia 6, it is now possible to offer third-party free and open source software through the openSUSE Build Service targeting Mageia. Through OBS, it is now possible for anyone to easily offer software built and tailored for Mageia, as well as software that is broadly compatible with Mageia along with other popular Linux distributions.
In addition, private Open Build Service instances interconnected with the openSUSE Build Service will automatically have support for building software for Mageia 6 and newer.
For more information on the openSUSE Build Service, please refer to the wiki page: OpenSUSE Build Service
The Mageia Control Center (MCC)'s help has been ported from WebKit1 to WebKit2.
ManaTools is 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. It comes with MPan, a generic launcher application that can run internal or external modules, such as system configuration tools.
ManaTools started as a port of the Mageia Control Center (MCC) 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. Each module, including MPan, can be run using either the Qt5, GTK+3 or ncurses interface.
Available tools are:
MageiaWelcome has been ported to Python 3 and GTK+3.
Isodumper, a tool to write ISO images on memory devices, comes with a new graphical interface, using libyui. Thus, Isodumper can use either GTK+ or Qt as graphical library. You have to choose which one you want to use, either isodumper-gtk or isodumper-qt. Isodumper also comes with an ncurses interface, which can be used even if no X session is available. For an upgrade, only the ncurses version will be available. You have to complete the installation of the graphical flavor manually.
The Docker ecosystem has been augmented (based on the 17.03 version of the engine) with many additional tools such as docker-compose (orchestration with v3 support), containerd (daemon controlling runC), docker-registry (share of images), docker machine (install docker on a remote system), and python-docker (python 2 and 3 libraries for engine API management).
With Mageia 6, the LiveCD Tools have been rebased to the latest version (v24.4), leveraging DNF and can make working images based on Mageia 6. This can be used for creating custom live media for personal use as well as custom media for sharing with others.
For information on how to use the LiveCD Tools, please refer to the wiki page: Using the LiveCD Tools
All hardware managed by this kernel version is enabled. The kernel provides better graphics with Mesa 17.1, which brings, among other features, increased performance for Intel hardware, and experimental reclocking in the nouveau driver.
Mageia 6 ships with X.Org 1.19.
Owners of NVIDIA Optimus laptops (integrated Intel graphics processor and discrete NVIDIA GPU) now have three ways to benefit from the power of their discrete GPU:
In all three cases, when configuring the graphics drivers, one must only configure the Intel card (at least in most Optimus configurations), as it is typically the only one physically connected to a monitor.
The keyboard and mouse drivers have been obsoleted by the generic evdev driver. The evdev driver has been used by default for a long time in Mageia and has replaced the former options. We packaged the keyboard and mouse drivers as fallbacks for years, but they are no longer included in Mageia. If someone is still relying on specific entries using those obsolete drivers, those sections should be removed. (Note that XFdrake has not written such sections since 2009.)
The libinput driver is now the default generic input driver instead of evdev. The latter is still packaged in case it is needed. Libinput also replaces the synaptics driver. The synaptics driver is no longer automatically installed when there is a touchpad.
All the desktop environments mentioned below are included in Mageia's online repositories, and can be installed in parallel on any Mageia 6 system. Some of them are also included on the physical media, LiveDVDs and Classical DVDs, as specified in each section.
Plasma, the new desktop environment of the KDE community, is provided in version 5.8 LTS. Plasma replaces the KDE SC 4 desktop environment, which is not maintained upstream anymore. Almost all KDE 4 applications were ported to Plasma, so you will benefit from a nice unified experience.
If you want to try Plasma under Wayland, just install plasma-workspace-wayland, and it should appear in your favorite display manager's list of desktop environments.
The default display manager (DM) for the Plasma environment is SDDM, and replaces the now obsolete KDM.
Plasma has a specific 64-bit LiveDVD and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
GNOME 3.24 is provided. It now defaults to running on Wayland, but also provides an alternative "GNOME on Xorg" session.
For those preferring the GNOME 2 look and feel, GNOME 3 also provides a "Gnome Classic" session.
GNOME has a specific 64-bit LiveDVD and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
The very lightweight GTK+2-based desktop environment is still available, and continues to receive improvements from upstream and our Mageia maintainer, even though its community has partly refocused on LXQt.
LXDE can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
XFCE 4.12 is provided.
XFCE has dedicated 32-bit and 64-bit LiveDVDs and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
LXQt 0.11.0 is provided.
LXQt cannot be installed out of the box from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer) due to space constraints on the ISOs. Online media need to be added to enable more options during the initial installation - this is explained in the installer documentation.
MATE 1.18.0 is provided. MATE Desktop was fully ported from GTK+2 to GTK+3.
MATE can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer). Due to DVD space considerations, some applications such as mate-screenshot (screenshot application) are not included in Classical DVD ISO. For a full MATE Desktop experience, users are suggested to install task-mate package after initial installation.
Cinnamon 3.2 is provided.
Cinnamon can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
The Enlightenment task package comes with E21.8 and Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). EFL now includes the previously separate Elementary, Evas-generic-loaders and Evas-generic-players packages. Also included are the connman connection manager for use with the E's Econnman UI, the Enlightenment authentication agent, and the EFL-based Terminology advanced terminal emulator and Ephoto 1.0, E's greatly improved image viewer. Mageia 6 also returns to having a Mageia-branded theme as the default.
As always, E does not automatically include the applications from /etc/xdg/autostart. After installation, go to Main menu > Settings > Startup Applications and add needed system processes (e.g., a policy kit authentication agent) and desired applications to be started on boot up. If your installation includes the ICE windows manager, you may choose between Polkit EFL and the MATE authentication polkit agents.
At the time of the release, there are a few known issues. First, the conflict between connman and Mageia's network center has not yet been resolved. Note that network center is fully functional and netapplet does not need to be added to the startup applications. Second, the E17 themes still in the repository do not work with E21. Updated themes are in the pipeline. Third, E21's system tray, based on SNI notification, seems not to be be fully functional and, since E20, has not supported Xembed notifications. If you need Xembed notifications, you can try installing the wmsystemtray.
You can also keep your Mageia 6 installation very light and we provide for this a plethora of small and efficient window managers. You can find afterstep, awesome, dwm, fluxbox, fvwm2, fvwm-crystal, i3, icewm, jwm, matchbox, openbox, pekwm, sugar, swm, and windowmaker. After installation, they appear in the login menu of your display manager.
You will find now both "icewm" and "icewm-session" in the login menu of your display manager.
Beginning with IceWM 1.2.13, there is a new binary named "icewm-session". This binary helps you to handle all IceWM subparts (icewmbg, icewm, icewmtray, startup, and shutdown, started in this order). Therefore, you should use icewm-session to start a complete IceWM session. Choosing "Icewm" will only start the window manager itself.
LibreOffice has been updated to 5.3. See official release notes for details.
Since the last patent expired in April, 2017, mp3 encoding is now available in the core media. Tainted medias are still needed for H.264 and AAC encoding.
Video editor Kdenlive now brings Movit GPU accelerated effects if you have OpenGL 3 compliant hardware.
Mixxx 2.0, which was also backported to Mageia 5, is more professional, with very good real-time music database handling, beat and note detection, and AutoDJ mode.
Vim has the "persistent undo" feature enabled by default, which is the new upstream default. "Persistent undo" enables undoing even if the file was saved many times, by storing all changes in .<filename>.un~ files.
If you prefer the old default behaviour, then add the following to your ~/.vimrc :
set noundofile set backup
In the Mageia community, our love for free software extends to open source games. A huge effort has been made during the Mageia 6 release cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 6 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 6. The following section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game category.
The following list is non-exhaustive.
The following list is non-exhaustive.
Mageia 6 comes with a set of nice gaming platforms and tools, among which:
For Mageia 6, a strong effort was made on packaging free and open source tools for game developers, among which:
Mageia 6 comes with both old and new versions of gcompris. The old is based on the GTK+ toolkit and has more activities. The new uses Qt and brings some new activities. We were [1] among the donors in February, 2015, to improve the graphical interface of this very important project.
GCC has been updated to 5.4.0, GDB to 7.12 and Valgrind to 3.12.0. LLVM has been updated to 3.9.1. LLDB is now packaged as well.
libvirt and virt-manager now support UEFI in VMs (one needs to install edk2-ovmf-x64).
Firebird has been updated to 3.0.1.
IPython has been updated to 5.0 (LTS version).
Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions (long term support when available), such as Qt 5.6.2 and GTK+ 3.22.16. Tcl/Tk is at version 8.6.5.
Python 3 has been updated to 3.5.3, Python 2 to 2.7.13, and when possible, all Python modules are provided for Python 2 and Python 3.
Perl has been updated to 5.22.3.
Some important effort has been made to simplify the Java stack which was hard to maintain in Mageia 5.
Ruby has been updated to 2.2.5p319.
Rust is at version 1.18.0 and its packaging is now synced with Fedora's Rust SIG, where Mageia packagers contribute directly. It will be updated during Mageia 6's support life to follow new developments.
Nextcloud 11 replaces ownCloud. This is both migration and several steps of upgrade. This software has limited ability to skip intermediate versions, so some iterative installs from MGA5 backports must be done *BEFORE* upgrading Mageia. See OwnCloud#Upgrading for details.
Please also read the known issues page, chapter "Upgrade Issues".
Upgrading from Mageia 5 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 5 (such as rpm and urpmi). Upgrading directly from Mageia 4 or another distribution is not supported.
If you want to upgrade a 64-bit system, it may contain 32-bit software. This is not a problem provided it does not include development libraries. You can identify these by the word "devel" in the name. To know if your system houses such libraries you can use the command:
You must un-install these libraries before upgrading.
If 3rd party repositories, such as Google, have been added during the use of Mageia 5, be sure to make a backup/copy of /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg.
If you have an ownCloud server or client on Mageia 5, do check OwnCloud#Upgrading before upgrading to Mageia 6!
There are several ways to upgrade from Mageia 5:
Warning: Upgrading an existing install using any of the Live images is NOT supported due to the Live 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 6, you have to do a complete installation. Direct upgrade is not supported.
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 and check you have enough free space (at least 2 GB, depending of your configuration) before starting upgrade.
If Mageia Online does not display a blue icon in the system tray offering you the option to upgrade to the new Mageia release:
1. Make sure that your system is fully up-to-date by applying all available updates. https://doc.mageia.org/mcc/6/en/content/MageiaUpdate.html
2. In Mageia Control Center - Software Management - Configure Updates Frequency, make sure that the option "Check for newer default releases" is selected. https://doc.mageia.org/mcc/6/en/content/mgaapplet-config.html
3. Look in your home folder for a hidden directory, /.MgaOnline. If there is a file mgaonline in that directory, then delete that file.
After a re-boot, the blue upgrade icon should appear when Mageia Online next checks for updates.
Alternatively, you can launch the upgrade process by entering in a terminal:
It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 6 distribution, configure Mageia media sources and start migration.
This method is useful when the root partition is encrypted as the booted system is already decrypting the partition.
There are multiple ways of getting a Command Line Interface (CLI).
The best method for performing an upgrade is to use run-level 3 so that the X server and graphical environment is not running.
Therefore, the upgrade should be cleaner using run-level 3 than using a terminal application as fewer programs are running which could potentially mess-up the upgrade.
Run-level 3 can be enabled by appending "3" to the kernel command line in grub's menu.lst file and then rebooting the system to get a login prompt.
It is recommended to run "script upgrade_log.txt" to capture the upgrade messages just in case a failure occurs. Use "exit" to quit out of "script".
Here are the general upgrade steps:
It is sometimes a good idea to test the upgrade before carrying it on.
With this command: urpmi --replacefiles --auto-update --auto --download-all --test all the packages are downloaded and the upgrade simulated only.
You can use the traditional (so, non-Live) Mageia 6 DVD to do clean installs, but also to upgrade from Mageia 5.
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 32-bit packages in an otherwise 64-bit install, because the 64-bit ISO will only contain the 64-bit packages, so the upgrade is likely to fail if you do not add online repositories.
Moreover, it is possible that a particular Mageia 5 installation may have received an update to a later version of software than that available on the ISO. When this happens, an upgrade may fail to complete. At the time the ISOs are tested, it is impossible to anticipate which Mageia 5 packages may be updated in the future, so 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.
See the Errata page.
If the samba server fails to start after upgrading to Mageia 6, you may change
security=share to security=user in /etc/samba/smb.conf and restart the samba service.
get-skype is now obsolete, as the classic Skype versions for Linux ceased to be supported by Skype on 1 July 2017. There is a new web-based Skype version which may be installed directly from the Skype web site by selecting the rpm version here. Note that only 64-bit systems are supported.
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.