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Classic Installer DVDs

bug 12549 Some users report unability to boot from DVD, whereas it works from USB stick. Messages seen resemble this: "ISOLINUX 6.02 Mageia ETCDisolinux:Disk error 01, AX=42D1, drive FE". It seems to be related to AHCI and disabling it could help.
- The above has been fixed with the Mageia 4.1 isos

In installation ,cannot mount xfs filesystem because the mount command cannot recognize the "acl" parameter.

Live CD/DVD

bug 12328 - Gnome Live Isos don't respect chosen locale settings in Live mode, but they use en_US for all settings. However, after install from either boot menu or desktop, the locale settings are OK.

For NVIDIA/sandy bridge hardware: Live disks may need to restart X in order to arrive at the Language choice: if the screen has gone black and disk activity stopped and no gui has come up to choose a language,
- try [ Alt + Ctrl + 2x BS ].
- or alternatively
  - go to another tty (Ctrl+Alt+F2, Ctrl+Alt+F3 or Ctrl+Alt+F4 or ...}),
  - login as 'live' user,
  - change to 'su -',
  - give the command "ps aux |grep X"
  - and kill the PID that is shown in the 2nd column (for example: "kill 1234")

For ThinkPad R50e (may be valid with computer with intel 915) on Live normal mode and safe mode boot into a frozen light black screen. A working Live DE can be reached by:
- adding " systemd.unit=multi-user.target" to the boot parameters (hit F6, esc, arrow up, add the string without the "")
- at the prompt, type "live" (without "")
- then type "su" (without "")
- then type "systemctl start prefdm.service" (again without "")
- after that, you'll get the normal screens to set some preferences and then reach the desktop. Installing from the desktop works fine

If your system has trouble starting the graphical interface (X), you can try several kernel options:
- Use the failsafe boot option.
  - known to fail in UEFI mode because it adds xdriver=vesa to the boot parameters, which means: use the BIOS's VESA implementation. With UEFI, there is no VESA, there's EFIFB instead.
- xdriver=(name of driver) to try to force the usage of a given driver. Example: xdriver=nouveau (open source driver for NVIDIA). Other drivers: intel, nvidia (NVIDIA proprietary driver), fglrx (ATI/AMD proprietary driver), radeon (open source driver for ATI/AMD)
- rd.blacklist=(name of driver) to try to prevent X from using a given driver.
- Here is a combination that works for some dual-GPU (Nvidia Optimus) configurations: rd.blacklist=nouveau rd.blacklist=nvidia xdriver=intel

Installer Issues

UEFI is not yet supported out of the box, but needs some extra steps: UEFI how-to

Bug 12362 - Legacy Grub (which is default bootloader for Mageia) can not boot from btrfs formatted root (/) or /boot partitions and installer doesn' t warn user about this or offer a separate ext4 /boot partition. Workaround: Installing Grub2 instead of legacy Grub or creating ext4 formatted /boot partition
bug 12343 If you use /boot partition on LVM be sure to select GRUB2 at the summary step, as GRUB is not able to recognize them.

Installing Mageia next to a GRUB2 based distribution

Installing Mageia next to a GRUB2 based distro (like Debian or Ubuntu) is not supported. With the default GRUB settings you won't be able to boot into your GRUB2 based distro anymore. To manually add a GRUB2 based system to your Mageia boot menu you may wish to follow the steps here.

Mageia boot fails when dual booted from a GRUB2 system

There is a bug in os-prober used by most GRUB2 based distributions which causes GRUB2 to generate faulty boot menu entries for Mageia. The bug is fixed in os-prober-1.53 but this was only released on May 8th 2012 and therefore still affects most GRUB2 based systems. There is more information on correcting this issue in the Mageia forum here. It will work with the line "initrd /boot/initrd.img" in the grub2 boot-entry.

Live Installer

bug 8953Sometimes, installs from live isos auto login after 2nd reboot

Upgrade Issues

The tracker for serious upgrade issues can be found here: (Upgrade tracker)

bug 12305 After upgrading, next boot may fail with "dracut Warning: /dev/resume does not exist." This is probably caused by changing the UUID of the swap partition, invalidating the kernel "resume=" boot option. Simply removing that option allows you to boot normally, afterwards the new UUID of the swap partition should be put in /etc/fstab and in your bootloader configuration
This also applies for all other filesystems/remote mounts, see Boot fails when webdav, sshfs etc. entries exist in fstab - or mounts with incorrect UUID
bug 12499 Upgrade can fail due to package conflicts involving task-lxde-minimal and task-lxde. Workaround: remove task-lxde from the system and try to upgrade again.
bug 11827 After upgrading with DVD, you might get a kernel panic when trying to boot the just installed Mageia 4 kernel. Selecting last Mageia 3 kernel in the bootloader menu, should work fine.
bug 12316 When upgrading using DVD, At "Summary -> Firewall" step, a mix of old and new network interfaces appears (eg. eth0 + enp5s0f0). After reboot, only the old naming appears in the system, as before. See bug report for detailed explanation of the cause.
bug 12012 When /boot is on a separate partition, installer doesn't check if there is enough space in that partition for added kernel(s).
bug 12423 When Mageia 3 is using Grub 2 which was installed manually (with urpmi) rather than using the drakxtools in MCC or during initial distribution install, then boot will fail after upgrade. This only applies where this grub2 is the master bootloader on the MBR of the boot drive. Workaround: Use "MCC -> Boot -> Setup Boot System" to re-setup grub2 BEFORE rebooting the upgraded system and all should be well. Alternate Workaround: Create a file /boot/grub2/drakboot.conf containing boot=/dev/sda (assuming the boot drive is sda) in the Mga3 system BEFORE starting the upgrade.
bug 12660 After upgrading from DVD you might get squares instead of text in some applications, namely Mageia Control Center. The problem is caused by empty /etc/pango/$(uname -m)/pango.modules. To fix that, run a command like this as root:

pango-querymodules > /etc/pango/$(uname -m)/pango.modules

Software Issues

Package installation or update fails with "problem reading synthesis file"

If MageiaUpdate, rpmdrake or urpmi fail to update your system or install new packages with an error similar to "problem reading synthesis file of medium XX", your local copy of your mirror's synthesis file might be affected by Bug 14235.

Remove your update media and add a new set to get fixed synthesis file. You can do this with (among other methods):

 urpmi.removemedia -a && urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist

Boot fails when webdav, sshfs etc. entries exist in fstab - or mounts with incorrect UUID

If you have entries for WebDAV storage or other uncommon network filesystems (e.g. sshfs via fuse) in /etc/fstab, after an upgrade your system may fail to boot and display messages similar to the following where the boot stalls:

 Dependency failed. Aborted start of Relabel all filesystems, if necessary [ABORT]
 Dependency failed. Aborted start of Mark the need to relabel after reboot [ABORT]
 Dependency failed. Aborted start of Setup links in /boot for running kernel [ABORT]
 Welcome to emergency mode. Use "systemctl default" or ^D to enter default mode.
 Give root password for maintenance (or type Control-D to continue):

To avoid this problem simply ensure that all network filesystems are clearly labelled with the "_netdev" option in fstab.

In addition, if any filesystem is non-critical for logins (i.e. not your $HOME), you should mark with the "nofail" option, otherwise the system will fail to boot successfully. This is recommended for all filesystems/remote mounts, including swap partition and windows partitions. This will ensure that the login screen starts quicker (i.e. before network and before the mount), otherwise it will be delayed until the network is up and the filesystem is mounted.

Also see Bug 10179 and bug 12305

journalctl

User access to system log messages

In Mageia release 3 system administrator could give users access to system log messages by adding them to the adm groups.

In Mageia release 4, you have to use systemd-journal instead of adm group.

Base system

Grub2

Support in Drakboot is only partial

Grub2 is recognized by drakboot (Mageia's boot configuration tool, used in installers and the Mageia control Center) but its configuration is only partial. For example configuration of entries is not working. If you need more options, it is recommended to use one of the native grub2 methods described in /usr/share/doc/grub2/README.Mageia. (Bug 9627)

Kernel options

like 'nokmsboot' are still to be added manually in /etc/default/grub. (Bug 8540)

They may be added into this line:-

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash quiet vga=792 nokmsboot resume....."

Note: After making changes to /etc/default/grub run update-grub (or update-grub2 which does the same) and enter the root password if asked.

Graphic modes

Similarly vga=xxx graphic modes when needed may also be added in the same place as shown above.

Note: After making changes to /etc/default/grub run update-grub (or update-grub2 which does the same) and enter the root password if asked.

Advanced sub-menu bug

After a kernel update, the second entry in the Advanced options for Mageia will not boot. It is unlikely that this option will be needed since it boots the same kernel as the main top-level entry. Running update-grub in a terminal once will repair it. (Bug 10024)

Multi-booting

When installing GRUB 2 to a partition (for multi-booting) using drakboot or the installer, nothing is written to the partition boot sector as this is not recommended for reliability reasons related to the use of block lists. These are prone to overwriting by some file system utilities, and not even possible on some file systems. Instead a copy of the grub2 kernel is written as /boot/grub2/i386-pc/core.img and this may be booted from either grub or grub2 used in a dedicated master bootloader or in another system.

A suitable entry in a grub legacy menu.lst for booting Mageia using grub2 installed to sda7 would be:

title Mageia 4 on sda7
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/grub2/i386-PC/core.img

An entry in a manually created /boot/grub2/grub.cfg (for a dedicated master bootloader) or when adding to an automatically generated menu using /boot/grub2/custom.cfg the entry would be:

menuentry 'Mageia 4 on sda7' {
root=(hd0,msdos7)
multiboot /boot/grub2/i386-pc/core.img
}

If /boot is on a separate partition (e.g. needed when btrfs is used for root) then a suitable entry (where /boot is on sda6) would be as below. Note also the changed multiboot path:

menuentry 'Mageia-4 (btrfs root)' {
root=(hd0,msdos6)
multiboot /grub2/i386-pc/core.img
}

A major advantage of grub2 over grub legacy is the ability to use partition labels without knowledge of unreliable device assignments. If the Mageia root partition is labelled 'mageia-4' (assuming /boot is not on a separate partition) then this may be used:

menuentry 'Mageia 4' {
search --no-floppy --label --set=root mageia-4
multiboot /boot/grub2/i386-pc/core.img
}

Note that since the partition boot record is not used by grub2, it may be used by grub legacy while both are installed together, allowing for chainloading into grub legacy and multibooting into grub2 from two separate master menu entries. Useful backup bootloader!

Minimal installs

When a minimal install of grub2 is needed it may be installed with urpmi grub2 --no-suggests which will omit os-prober and the grub2-mageia-theme, giving a classical grub2 text only menu with no other systems listed. os-prober may be installed later as may the grub2-mageia-theme package - just install or un-install these at will and the effect will be seen at the next boot.

KDE Leave menu

To use the KDE options on the Leave > Reboot sub-menu (accessed by clicking on the yellow icon - not the text) with grub2, it is necessary to change /etc/default/grub to include:

GRUB_DEFAULT=saved

Run update-grub after editing /etc/default/grub

Also systemsettings > System Administration > Login Screen > Shutdown tab > Boot Manager needs grub2 selected.

Networkmanager

If you install NetworkManager, its service will not be automatically started when system boots up. To enable it, as root: systemctl enable NetworkManager.service

CUPS / ghostscript filters

bug 11684 For some users there are issues with some CUPS / ghostscript filters preventing the printer from processing it's print jobs.

An update to resolve this is available since 2014-02-25. It concerns:


i586	x86_64
cups-filters-1.0.41-3.1.mga4.i586 libcups-filters-devel-1.0.41-3.1.mga4.i586 libcups-filters1-1.0.41-3.1.mga4.i586	cups-filters-1.0.41-3.1.mga4.x86_64 lib64cups-filters-devel-1.0.41-3.1.mga4.x86_64 lib64cups-filters1-1.0.41-3.1.mga4.x86_64

Internationalization

because the immodules.cache is missing,firefox and many GTK 2 apps cannot use input method e.g. ibus, scim, fcitx ,etc. (bug 8731)
- WORKAROUND: run the following command as root in terminal:

gtk-query-immodules-2.0 --update-cache

default hot key for switching input method in ibus has changed from Ctrl+Space to Super+Space. This is not a bug but it is different to most users' habits from Windows OS and previous releases of most Linux distributions.

KDE

Apper

Bug 12481 - apper notifies user of updates, but fails to perform an update. WORKAROUND: disable apper, as root:

sed -i 's/X-KDE-Kded-autoload=true/X-KDE-Kded-autoload=false/' /usr/share/kde4/services/kded/apperd.desktop

Use mageia's mgaapplet instead.

An update to resolve this is available since 2014-02-06.

default panel icon size too big

The default icon size for panel icons is currently set to 256 (pixels). This may result in really wide icons being shown in the control panel, when adding applets to the panel. This was encountered with network management applet (plasma-applet-nm) and also for new versions of the Homerun launcher and Folder applets.

To fix it, go to System Settings > Application Appearance > Icons > Advanced > Panel and adjust the size (e.g. to 32) and then logout/login.

See forum threads https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6862 and https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6892 for more information

SimpleWelcome behind application window

If you is using any application with window and click in SimpleWelcome (plasma-applet-simplewelcome), the full-screen launcher will be presented behind the application window.

To fix it, you need to go to KDE System Settings -> Windows Behavior and change the focus from "Low" to "None". It will fix this problem.

References: #mdv64369

GNOME

NetworkManager doesn't manage devices in default GNOME installation

As NetworkManager is not the default network connection manager for Mageia, it can be confusing in a default GNOME install. net_applet, the default Mageia tool is hardly visible (in legacy systray in lower right corner) and NetworkManager is directly present.

If you want to use NetworkManager, please close net_applet and disable autostart for it (via right-click menu) and hand over control over your interfaces to NetworkManager, as root in a terminal do:

 sed -i s/NM_CONTROLLED=no/NM_CONTROLLED=yes/ /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0

GNOME automatic lock screen has been disabled by default on live images as it does not always unlock properly without switching to console and back to gui mode again. To re-enable it, open a terminal and run the command: "gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.screensaver lock-enabled true" or in GNOME Settings -> Privacy -> Screen Lock. bug 10970

GNOME Live DVD cannot be localized in live session. Whether you select any language during boot, only english UI is used in Live desktop session. Localization works normally after installed to hard drive.

gnome-tweak-tool (quoted 8 in First_step_with_Gnome and corresponding figure) which is essential to manage your deskop and workspaces wasn't installed. You have to install the package and it will appear in your Activities.

Gparted

Launching Gparted from GUI will not make it start to do lacking of polkit support. Workaround is to open it via the terminal as root.

An update to resolve this is available since 2014-03-19, see https://advisories.mageia.org/MGAA-2014-0083.html

HP-Gui

The process applet.py or hp-systray which correspond to the HP-Gui applet, can use a lot of CPU load. The problem is related to NVIDIA proprietary drivers. Workaround is to disable it by removing the hplip-gui package.

An update to resolve this is available since 2014-02-26.

Mate

Bug 12463Some users may encounter multiple caja instances during first startup. This is one time issue and currently there is no upstream fix. See: Related Mate Github issue

Due to Bluez5 incompability, mate-bluetooth and mate-file-manager-sendto-bluetooth packages won't work as intended and planned to be dropped from distribution until upstream release fixed version. See: Related Mate Github issue

mate-file-manager (caja), mate-document-viewer (atril) and mate-text-editor (pluma) stores user settings in ~/.config/mate/ directory. Users should migrate their settings for these applications manually. Or use below command to do this:

mv ~/.config/{caja,pluma,atril} ~/.config/mate/

You will notice there is no volume tray icon in panel although sound works. This is because mate-media packages are not installed by default. You should install either mate-media-pulse (PulseAudio backend) or mate-media-gstreamer (Gstreamer backend) to get a working volume tray applet.

Some mate utilities, e.g. mate-screenshot, are provided by mate-utils package, like Mandrake/Mandriva did for gnome-utils. Please install mate-utils package to access these mate utilities.

modemmanager spamming the logs

Mageia Bug 11725 and Redhat Bug 1018017 and GNOME Bug 703040

networkmanager periodically tries to ping modem interfaces, and in turn tries to use modemmanager for that. As it cannot enable the service and it is disabled by default it will spam the logs every two minutes with this message

 dbus[956]: [system] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.ModemManager1' unit='dbus-org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.service'
 dbus[956]: [system] Activation via systemd failed for unit 'dbus-org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.service': Unit dbus-org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.service failed to load: No such file or directory.

Workaround is to enable modemmanager service, even if you don't have a modem to stop the message being written to logs. You can do that via

systemctl enable ModemManager
ln -s '/usr/lib/systemd/system/ModemManager.service' '/etc/systemd/system/dbus-org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.service'
ln -s '/usr/lib/systemd/system/ModemManager.service' '/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/ModemManager.service'

(Note the latter two lines are ONLY output, what systemd does is shown there)

An update to resolve this is available since 2014-02-11.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice Calc Freezes KDE when trying to move a cell. Problem is due to libreoffice-kde. Workaround is to remove it (using #urpme libreoffice-kde). See Bug 11996

LXDE

Bug 11185 - Windowmaker docks appearing on LXDE

Mageia Tools

Msec-gui can use a lot of CPU load, see process msecgui.py.

kompozer (and also bluegriffon)

kompozer and bluegriffon will crash when using the oxygen-gtk theme under KDE.

Update 25/01/2015: A fix for this has been provided for the default oxygen-gtk theme: http://advisories.mageia.org/MGAA-2015-0004.html

- 1. workaround is to pass an override to oxygen-gtk theme engine so start kompozer/bluegriffon via

 OXYGEN_APPLICATION_NAME_OVERRIDE=xulrunner kompozer
 OXYGEN_APPLICATION_NAME_OVERRIDE=xulrunner bluegriffon

- 2. workaround is to choose another theme, e.g. via kde-gtk-config as described in the bugreport

Mageia 4 guests under KVM

bug 14607 - Using a QXL video card model for a KVM virtual machine may cause a Mageia 4 guest to crash when switching virtual terminals. A workaround is to disable kernel mode-setting (KMS) in the guest by passing a modeset=0 parameter to the qxl kernel module. This can be achieved by issuing (as root):

echo 'options qxl modeset=0' >> /etc/modprobe.d/qxl-no-kms.conf

and then re-creating the initrd with dracut (again as root):

dracut --force

After a reboot, the guest should be able to switch virtual terminals without crashing.

Hardware Issues

network printer detection via system-config-printer

bug 12137 and bug 12781 The Mageia backend for network printer detection is broken, hence network printers cannot be found via searching for them. Additionally this can cause printing to fail, even when you don't use a network printer. There is an update candidate available for this in core/updates_testing, system-config-printer-1.4.3-1.1.mga4

An update to resolve this is available since 2014-09-15.

nvidia proprietary drivers

There can be issues starting programs with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, caused by a library incorrectly handling an empty file, /etc/pkcs11/pkcs11.conf. If this file is empty on your installation, a workaround is to remove it as root via

 rm -f /etc/pkcs11/pkcs11.conf

The most prominent affected applications were Akonadi, claws-mail, kdenlive, kwrite, digikam, kdevelop, XBMC and xscanimage - for a full list, please have a look at the tracker bug.

An update to resolve this is available since 2014-02-15. It concerns:


i586	x86_64
p11-kit-0.20.1-3.3.mga4.i586.rpm p11-kit-trust-0.20.1-3.3.mga4.i586.rpm libp11-kit0-0.20.1-3.3.mga4.i586.rpm libp11-kit-devel-0.20.1-3.3.mga4.i586.rpm	p11-kit-0.20.1-3.3.mga4.x86_64.rpm p11-kit-trust-0.20.1-3.3.mga4.x86_64.rpm lib64p11-kit0-0.20.1-3.3.mga4.x86_64.rpm lib64p11-kit-devel-0.20.1-3.3.mga4.x86_64.rpm

ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000

AMD dropped support of Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 in their proprietary driver "Catalyst". However, the open source radeon driver should work perfectly on this hardware.

Broadcom Wireless

Beginning with Mageia 3 we have switched to using free drivers for all known supported wireless devices instead of using the proprietary Broadcom wl driver. However for some users the free drivers do not work well (or at all), and in that case you can enable Nonfree medias, and install broadcom-wl-kernel-$flavour-latest (replace $flavour with the what matches your kernel). The install DVDs and the live CDs / DVDs have the needed drivers available.

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