Mageia is distributed via ISO images. This page will help you to choose which image best suits your needs.
There are two families of media:
Classical installer: Booting with this media provides you with the maximum flexibility when choosing what to install, and for configuring your system. In particular, you have a choice of which Desktop environment to install
LIVE media: This option allows you to try out Mageia without having to actually install it, or make any changes to your computer. If the installation is decided, the process is simpler, but you get fewer choices than offered by the Classical installer
Details are given in the next sections.
Here, a medium (plural: media) is an ISO image file that allows you to install and/or update Mageia and by extension any physical support (DVD, USB stick, ...) the ISO file is copied to.
You can find Mageia ISO's here.
These ISOs use the Classical installer called drakx.
They are used for performing clean installs or to upgrade a previously installed version of Mageia.
Different media for 32 and 64 bit architectures.
Some tools are available in the Welcome screen: Rescue System, Memory Test, Hardware Detection Tool.
Each DVD contains many available desktop environments and languages.
You'll be given the choice during the installation to add non free software.
Can be used to preview the Mageia operating system without having to install it. Can also be used to install Mageia if you wish.
Each ISO contains only one desktop environment (Plasma, GNOME or Xfce).
Different media for 32 and 64 bit architectures.
Live ISOs can only be used to create clean installations, they cannot be used to upgrade previously installed Mageia releases.
They contain non free software.
Plasma desktop environment only.
All available languages are present.
64 bit architecture only.
GNOME desktop environment only.
All available languages are present.
64 bit architecture only
These are minimal ISO's containing no more than that which is needed to start the drakx installer and find drakx-installer-stage2 and other packages that are needed to continue and complete the install. These packages may be on the PC hard disk, on a local drive, on a local network or on the Internet.
These media are very light (less than 100 MB) and are convenient if bandwidth is too low to download a full DVD, or if you have a PC without a DVD drive or is unable to boot from a USB stick.
Different media for 32 and 64 bit architectures.
First steps are English language only.
Contains only free software, for those people who prefer not to use non-free software.
Once you have chosen your ISO file, you can download it using either http or BitTorrent. In both cases, you are provided with some information, such as the mirror in use and an option to switch if the bandwidth is too low. If http is chosen, you will also see something regarding checksums.
md5sum and sha1sum are tools to check the ISO integrity. Choose one or the other, and copy the checksum for later use. Then a window similar to this one appears:
Select the Save File option, then, click OK.
The checksums referred to earlier, are digital fingerprints generated by an algorithm from the file to be downloaded. You may compare the checksum of your downloaded ISO against that of the original source ISO. If the checksums do not match, it means that the actual data on the ISO's do not match, and if it is the case, then you should retry the download or attempt a repair using BitTorrent.
To generate the checksum for your downloaded ISO, open a console, (no need to be root), and:
To use md5sum, type:
md5sum path/to/the/image/file.iso.To use sha1sum, type:
sha1sum path/to/the/image/file.iso
Example:
and compare the result (you may have to wait for a while) with the checksum provided by Mageia.
The verified ISO can now be burned to a CD/DVD or dumped to a USB stick. This is not a standard copy operation as a bootable medium will actually be created.
Whichever software you use, ensure that the option to burn an image is used, burn data or files is not correct. See the Mageia wiki for more information.
All Mageia ISOs are hybrids, which means you can 'dump' them to a USB stick and then use it to boot and install the system.
Warning
"Dumping" an image onto a flash device destroys any previous file-system on the device; any existing data will be lost and the partition capacity will be reduced to the image size.
To recover the original capacity, you must redo partitioning and re-format the USB stick.
You can use a graphical tool like IsoDumper
You could try:
Rufus using the "ISO image" option;
Warning
It is potentially *dangerous* to do this by hand. You risk overwriting potentially valuable existing data if you specify the wrong target device.
Open a console
Become a root (Administrator) user with the command
su -(don't forget the final '-' )
Plug in your USB stick (do not mount it, this also means do not open any application or file manager that could access or read it)
Enter the command
fdisk -l
Find the device name for your USB stick (by its size), for example
/dev/sdbin the screenshot above, it is an 8GB USB stick.Alternatively, you can find the device name with the command
dmesg: towards the end of this example, you can see the device name starting with sd, and in this case, sdd is the actual device. You can also see that its size is 2GB:[72594.604531] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 27 using xhci_hcd [72594.770528] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=8564, idProduct=1000 [72594.770533] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 [72594.770536] usb 1-1: Product: Mass Storage Device [72594.770537] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: JetFlash [72594.770539] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 18MJTWLMPUCC3SSB [72594.770713] usb 1-1: ep 0x81 - rounding interval to 128 microframes, ep desc says 255 microframes [72594.770719] usb 1-1: ep 0x2 - rounding interval to 128 microframes, ep desc says 255 microframes [72594.771122] usb-storage 1-1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected [72594.772447] scsi host8: usb-storage 1-1:1.0 [72595.963238] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access JetFlash Transcend 2GB 1100 PQ: 0 ANSI: 4 [72595.963626] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] 4194304 512-byte logical blocks: (2.14 GB/2.00 GiB) [72595.964104] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off [72595.964108] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 43 00 00 00 [72595.965025] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] No Caching mode page found [72595.965031] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Assuming drive cache: write through [72595.967251] sdd: sdd1 [72595.969446] sd 8:0:0:0: [sdd] Attached SCSI removable diskEnter the command: #
dd if=path/to/the/ISO/file of=/dev/sdX bs=1MWhere X=your device name eg: /dev/sdd
Example: #
dd if=/home/user/Downloads/Mageia-6-x86_64-DVD.iso of=/dev/sdd bs=1MTip
It might helpful to know that if stands for input file and of stands for output file
Enter the command: #
syncThis is the end of the process, and you may now unplug your USB stick.
