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.
The latest stable release of the Mageia project, Mageia 7 was developed for over one year before. It will be supported with security and bug fix updates for 18 months, up to XX XXXXXry 2020.
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 size.
For more information, please have a look at our installation media manual page.
You will find the different download options on the Mageia 7 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 configured, but they are not enabled by default. 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. In case you want to install such packages that have dependencies on packages from 32-bit repositories, like PlayOnLinux or Steam, please make sure that you have at least "Core 32bit Release" and "Core 32bit Updates" enabled.
The ARM (Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machine) port rebooted during Mageia 6 days has been enhanced. The core is available for ARMv7 and aarch64. Support for ARMv5 has been dropped.
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 7's release.
automatic=method:disk,disk:vdb,partition:vdb1,dir:/Mageia/Mga6.isoNew translations have been added, while others were improved. Thank you to our dedicated community of translators for your reliable work.
RPM has been upgraded to version 4.14.2.1.
RPM 4.14 offers key improvements to RPM as a whole, including:
More information on changes from RPM 4.13 (which shipped with Mageia 6) to RPM 4.14.2.1 is available from the RPM website:
DNF (Dandified Yum) was introduced as an alternative to urpmi since 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).
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 7 ships with DNF v4.2.6. This version improves DNF over version 2.x in Mageia 6 by rewriting most of the logic from Python to C++ and moving it to the libdnf library for performance.
For the first time, system upgrades using DNF are now supported. See the section on upgrading with DNF in the release notes for more information.
This new version of DNF will now use repository metadata compressed with zchunk when available. Zchunk is a new compression format designed to allow for highly efficient deltas. With repositories compressed with zchunk, DNF will now download only the differences between any earlier copies of the metadata and the current version, allowing for considerable bandwidth savings on regular metadata refreshes. See the zchunk section in the release notes for more information.
It also introduces support for modules, though Mageia is not currently publishing any modules in its repositories.
More information on modularity: https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/
DNF release notes: https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/release_notes.html
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 7, 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.
Our RPM-MD (RPM MetaData) repositories (used by DNF and PackageKit) provide AppStream metadata. Tools like GNOME Software (GNOME Desktop, packaged as gnome-software) and Plasma Discover (KDE Plasma Desktop, packaged as 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 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/
Our RPM-MD (RPM MetaData) repository metadata (used by DNF and PackageKit) is compressed using the zchunk format in addition to the gzip format used previously.
zchunk is a new compression format designed to allow for highly efficient deltas. When Mageia's metadata is compressed using zchunk, DNF will download only the differences between any earlier copies of the metadata and the current version. DNF and related tools will see significant reductions in the size of the metadata they download, especially if they are run on a regular basis.
Zchunk repository metadata is only supported with the DNF package manager and applications using it, such as dnfdragora, gnome-software, and discover.
For more information about zchunk, see the following articles:
The 'Welcome' screen is an application that is presented to users when booting into a fresh installation of Mageia. It has now been entirely reworked to have a linear approach, with successive steps following in a logical order of important things to know and do post-installation. By default, it will run at each subsequent boot, but this behaviour is optional. Even if the auto-run option is disabled - it can be invoked at any time as an application (mageiawelcome).
Under the hood, it uses Python and QML. It is now resizeable and will use the fonts of the desktop environment.
Isodumper is a tool to write ISO images on memory devices. It now uses an improved checking routine after writing operations by looking for a sha512 sum file and corresponding signature. If the sum is found, the application compares the computed sum to the stored one, and additionally indicates if the sum is signed. Another modification is that the application no longer runs with root privileges, but as a user's application - root privileges are requested only when needed (for writing or formatting operations). This should improve the security level.
We also added a feature in relation to Live images: By ticking a check-box, any remaining space on the device can be designated as a persistence partition. See here for more information.
The Docker ecosystem has been augmented (based on the 18.09 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 7, the LiveCD Tools have been rebased to the latest version (v27.0).
For information on how to use the LiveCD Tools, please refer to the wiki page: Using the LiveCD Tools
The tool used to build the distribution Live ISOs has been revised to make it easier to use. Several examples are provided to help users build their own customised variants of the Live ISOs. There is now a GUI mode, based on the Mageia classical installer, to support package and locale selection.
For more information, please refer to the wiki page: draklive2
All hardware managed by this kernel version is enabled. The kernel provides better graphics with Mesa 19.1.
Mageia 7 ships with X.Org 1.20.4.
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.
All the desktop environments mentioned below are included in Mageia's online repositories, and can be installed in parallel on any Mageia 7 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 5.15.
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 3.32 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 4.13 is provided. It uses GTK+3 instead of GTK+2 as with Xfce 4.12. If version 4.14 becomes available in the lifecycle of Mageia 7, it will be updated to 4.14.
Xfce has dedicated 32-bit and 64-bit LiveDVDs and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
LXQt 0.14.1 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 1.22.0 is provided.
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 4.0 is provided.
Cinnamon can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
The Enlightenment task package comes with E22.4 and Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), which 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, E's Polkit-EFL authentication agent, and three EFL-based applications: the Terminology advanced terminal emulator, the nimble Ephoto image viewer, and the light-weight Rage video player. As with the prior release, Mageia 7 also offers a Mageia-branded theme as the default.
As always, E does not automatically include the startup 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 the MATE authentication agent that comes with it and Polkit-EFL.
Beginning with E20, Enlightenment's system tray converted from Xembed notifications with SNI appindicator notifications, which is not yet supported by all applications (e.g., Parcellite clipboard manager), while others use plugins (e.g, Pidgin, which has an Ubuntu indicator plugin in the Mageia package to enable systray notifications).
As of the Beta releases there are three known issues. First, for systems with optical drives, the Enlightenment File Manager (EFM) does not mount them even though disks with and without data can be seen with other file managers. Second, Mageia enables systemd-networkd to manage networking by default. Those who prefer to use connman with the Econnman interface will find it is not always functional (after disabling systemd-networkd and enabling connman), probably as a result of the default wpa_supplicant configuration. (There is a separate, recently-developed wireless gadget for managing multiple backends that is not yet included in the Mageia repositories.) Third, the E17 themes still in the repository do not work with E22. Updated Mageia-branded themes may be packaged in the near future. Additional themes may also be found at https://www.enlightenment-themes.org/.
You can also keep your Mageia 7 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 6.2.3.2. See official release notes for details.
Since the last patent expired in April, 2017, mp3 encoding is now available in the core media. Tainted media are still needed for H.264, H.265/HEVC and AAC encoding.
In the Mageia community, our love for free software extends to open source games. A huge effort has been made during the Mageia 7 release cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 7 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 7. The following section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game category.
Mageia 7 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 8.3.1, GDB to 8.2 and Valgrind to 3.15.0. LLVM has been updated to 8.0.0.
Firebird has been updated to 3.0.4
IPython has been updated to 7.2.
Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions (long-term support when available), such as Qt 5.12.2 and GTK+ 3.24.8. Tcl/Tk is at version 8.6.9.
libvirt has been updated to 5.3, virt-manager to 2.1.
VirtualBox is at version 6.0.8
Xen is at version 4.12.
Python 3 has been updated to 3.7.3, Python 2 to 2.7.16, and when possible, all Python modules are provided for Python 2 and Python 3.
Perl has been updated to 5.28.2. Perl modules are now installed either in /usr/share/perl5 (pure perl modules) or /usr/lib(64)/perl5 (binary modules), like Fedora does. Perl version is no more included in the standard path. Perl now uses 64bit integer by default on 32bit.
Some important effort has been made to simplify the Java stack which was hard to maintain in Mageia 6.
Ruby has been updated to 2.5.3.
Rust is at version 1.35.0. It will be updated during Mageia 7's support life to follow new developments.
PHP has been updated from 5.6 to 7.3, which gives a performance improvement of about 50%.
Upgrading from Mageia 6 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 6 (such as rpm and urpmi). Upgrading directly from Mageia 5 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 6, be sure to make a backup/copy of /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg.
There are several ways to upgrade from Mageia 6:
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 7, 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/dnf system-upgrade). Each method is outlined below.
Fully update your system and check you have enough free space (at least 2 GB, depending on your configuration) before starting the 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/7/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/7/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 reboot, the blue upgrade icon should appear when Mageia Online next checks for updates.
If Mageia 6 has reached EOL, you will see an orange icon and a pop-up warning that Mageia 6 is no longer supported.
Alternatively, you can launch the upgrade process by entering in a terminal:
It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 7 distribution, configure Mageia media sources and start the 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 by editing it at boot and to get then a login prompt. Other option is to use the command: systemctl isolate multi-user.target
It is recommended to run "script upgrade_log.txt" before to launch the next commands to capture the upgrade messages just in case a failure occurs. The messages will be written in upgrade_log.txt file. 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 --auto-update --auto --force --download-all --test all the packages are downloaded and the upgrade simulated only.
If you're using DNF for software management (and have it configured appropriately per the wiki page on using DNF), you can upgrade to Mageia 7 in just a few steps (note all commands must be run as root):
1. Ensure you're fully up to date: dnf upgrade
2. Install the dnf system-upgrade plugin: dnf install 'dnf-command(system-upgrade)'
3. Run the system-upgrade download phase: dnf system-upgrade --releasever 7 download --allowerasing
4. If the simulation and proposed upgrade looks good to you, trigger the upgrade: dnf system-upgrade reboot
You can use the traditional (so, non-Live) Mageia 7 DVD to do clean installs, but also to upgrade from Mageia 6.
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 6 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 6 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.
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.
cvsps version 2, which was last updated over ten years ago, is now obsolete. It was used by git-cvsimport from the git-cvs package. If you are performing a one-shot import of a CVS repository, consider using cvs-fast-export.
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.
By default, Mageia uses UUIDs for block-devices. It is possible that you deviated from the default and manually changed /etc/fstab to use device names for MMC block-devices. If so, you will have to change this from /dev/mmcblk0 to /dev/mmcblk1. This has changed in Linux kernel 4.14.