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Türkçe(tr) : Kurulum Ortamı


This page lists in detail the various available installation media for the Mageia distribution. The iso images to install Mageia can be found here.

All Mageia ISO images are hybrid, which means you can burn them to an optical DVD/CD disc or just dump them on a USB stick and use it to boot and install the system.

Installation-only media

Mageia's DVD ISO and Dual-arch CD ISO both use the traditional drakx installer, these are not Live DVD/CDs, i.e. they cannot be used to preview or test run the distro, they can only be used to install Mageia on a HDD (or USB HDD). Below, is a detailed explanation of the features which each of these media provides.

DVD ISO

The DVD ISO can be used to install KDE4, GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE or LXDE, i.e. these are the desktop environments available on the disc itself. The drakx installer includes the capability of adding the online Mageia repositories during the installation, which means you can install even more packages than those available on the disc.

You'll be given the choice to add nonfree software during install, for finding nonfree softwares on it (e.g. the NVIDIA or AMD/ATI proprietary graphics cards drivers or firmware for wifi cards... etc). You can also add the online repositories during the installation and you can reconfigure your hardware at the Summary stage (towards the end of the installation) to install the nonfree software needed for your hardware.

The DVD ISO comes in two editions:

  • i586 (32bit)
  • x86_64 (64bit)

Note: the 64-bit version will not work on 32-bit hardware.

Dual arch ISO

Like the normal DVD ISO, this ISO also uses the drakx traditional installer. The Dual Arch ISO should be considered a minimal installation disc (a ~ 700MB CD ISO). In addition, the only desktop environment available on the ISO is xfce4[1]. The strongest point of the Dual arch ISO, is it can be used to install either a 32bit system or an x86_64 system, the installer defaults to x86_64 when it detects a 64bit-capable CPU.
As the selection of the architecture in the initial graphical GRUB menu is not working anymore, you can add some option in the command line like initrd=alt0/32/all.rdz or initrd=alt0/64/all.rdz)

This ISO is generally for advanced users and system administrator for fast deployment of Mageia. As it uses the same drakx installer, you can add the online repositories during the installation to install more packages, desktop environments... etc.

Note that since Mageia 3, this ISO contains a limited list of non-free packages for drivers: atmel, bluez, ipw2100, ipw2200, microcode, radeon, ralink, rtlwifi, and the iwlwifi-*-ucode. You have access to them if you enabled the non-free repository.

[1] The installer offers options to install KDE and GNOME, even though they're not on the ISO, as you can install them from the online sources (for this to work you have to set up the online sources in one of the previous steps during the installation).

Live CD ISO

A Live CD ISO can be used to preview the distro without first installing it on a HDD. Simply download the ISO, burn it on a CD using your favourite ISO burner (or dump it on a USB key using dd, isoDumper or usbdumper, see #Dump_Mageia_ISO_on_a_USB_flash_drive), boot the system to see how well the distro works on your machine, and optionally install Mageia on your HDD; there's an icon on the desktop to start the draklive installer.

To limit the size of ISOs, each Mageia Live ISO contains only one desktop environment (KDE4 or GNOME).

N.B. Installing a live ISO to your HDD simply copies the virtual file system of the Live ISO to your drive, along with some machine-specific configuration. For this reason, Live ISOs can only be used to create clean installations, they cannot be used to upgrade from previous releases.

Network Installs

You can perform network installs using either boot.iso or all.img, you can find them on the mirrors in <mirror url>/Mageia/distrib/cauldron/$ARCH/install/images/ .

Both the boot.iso and all.img are very minimalistic images, which you can use to start the drakx installer and set up the online sources:

  • boot.iso is like a regular ISO you can burn it on an optical disc or dump it on a USB stick (see below) like any of the other Mageia ISOs. Read more about installing with it here: Boot.iso install
  • all.img is an image that you dump on a USB stick using the dd command; this is explained in detail in the next section, just replace the name of the iso with all.img.

Dump Mageia ISO on a USB flash drive

All Mageia ISOs are hybrid, which means you can 'dump' them on a USB stick and use it to boot, test, and (optionally) install the system.

Note: "dumping" an image onto a flash device destroys any prior file-system in the partition; access to any data not destroyed will be lost, and partition capacity will be reduced to the image size. In other words, all prior data on the device is at risk.

Note: Unetbootin should not be used to copy the iso image to a usb drive (see below).

To dump a Mageia installation ISO on a USB stick, you may try one of several tools:

  • copyiso2usbX, which you currently can download from [1]. This is currently English only, but is intended to become part of a Mageia package. The script should be run using the root id, requires the packages dcfldd, cdialog, Xdialog, mlocate, and udisks to already be installed, and requires /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron to have been run, since the iso was downloaded.
If it shows 'writing error or access denied' try the following method: run the console (cmd), then type 'diskpart', then 'list disk', then select your disk with 'select disk', and type 'clean' (it will erase the key. If you specify the system's disk instead of the key, you will lost the system !).

Using the dd Command to Install a Live ISO Files to a USB Device Example

 dd if=mageia-livecd-1-KDE4-europe1-americas-cdrom-i586.iso of=/dev/sd(x) bs=1M

where (x)=your device name eg: /dev/sdb;/dev/sdc....etc

1419264+0 records in
1419264+0 records out
726663168 bytes (727 MB) copied, 273.084 s, 2.7 MB/s 
  • BE VERY CAREFUL TO USE THE CORRECT DEVICE NAME AS YOU CAN OVERWRITE YOUR HARD DISK WITHOUT ANY WARNING

HINT: type lsblk or mount in terminal to see the USB device name.

  • Then safely remove the USB (it it should be mounted
  • Type mount again and see which device is missing
  • NEVER USE /dev/sda (that's usually your main system drive)

Since this method uses the whole usb stick you have to specify the node of the device and not of a partition on the device (e.g. use /dev/sde not /dev/sde1); you should be very careful when using this method because writing the image to an SCSI or SATA hard disk will render it unbootable and destroy some data on it.

LiveUSB MultiBoot Methods (verified)

  • Make an Easy2Boot USB Flash/Hard drive Easy2Boot - copy the ISO file (and any others) to the \_ISO\MAINMENU or \_ISO\LINUX folder.
  • The Linux tool MultiSystem is supported in French and English.

Other LiveUSB Methods (not yet verified)

  • The free Windows tool LiLi supports many distros.
  • Easy2Boot project RMPrepUSB is a grub4dos multiboot USB drive solution. It boots 99% of all linux distros (it uses a generic method). All you need to do is copy the ISO file to the grub4dos USB drive's \_ISO\MAINMENU folder (no utility needed) and then run some defrag utility to ensure the ISO file is contiguous. (author's post in the forum)

Other LiveUSB Methods (currently not working)

  • A sourceforge project multibootusb, a tool for several Linux distros or Windows versions, uses the Grub4dOS bootloader (and Gambas3).
  • The Windows tools YUMI and UUI at PenDriveLinux (for single-boot and multi-boot) may work someday, likely with boot parameters specifying location for distro files; both unpack an iso to flash and use syslinux to make it bootable.

Removing the Live ISO Files from USB Media

Removing the files from a USB stick once you've installed Mageia.

From Mageia,

1) Open a Terminal & switch to root. type:

su

you will be prompted for the password

2) Confirm the device by copying & pasting this command.

fdisk -l

the entry for a 4g [actual size 3.98g] flash drive on my computer looks like:

Disk /dev/sdb: 3980 MB, 3980394496 bytes
4 heads, 16 sectors/track, 121472 cylinders, total 7774208 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

        Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
  • your device could have a different designation than sdb.

Make sure you are reformatting the correct drive, there is no going back, all data will be lost!

The size of the drive is a good way to confirm which drive you are going to reformat

3) Unmount the device by copying & pasting:

umount /dev/sdb

4) Reformat the USB device to fat32, by copying & pasting:

mkdosfs -F 32 -I /dev/sdb

Now you have a nice blank flash drive ready to use again

Since release 0.32, isoDumper offers a feature to format the key and give it a name.

From Windows, a normal format will not restore access to full storage capacity. Disk Management may be able to restore full storage access. BootIce from ipauly.com, rufus or HPformatUSB can restore partitioning (to be completed)

Checking the Downloaded Image File Integrity

Principle

Did you notice in the Download Mageia page, the hexadecimal number called md5sum or sha1sum? Both have been calculated by an algorithm from the file to be downloaded. If your ask this algorithm to calculate again this number from your downloaded file, either you have the same number and your downloaded file is correct, or the number is different and you met a failure. Give yourself another try.

Practical

Open a console, no need to be root, and to use md5sum type:

[sam@localhost]$ md5sum path/to/the/image/file.iso

Or to use sha1sum:

[sam@localhost]$ sha1sum path/to/the/image/file.iso

and compare the obtained number on your computer (you may have to wait for a while) with the number given by Mageia.

Example:

Md5sum.png


How to Fix a Broken ISO Download

If you have spent a long time downloading an ISO only to find that it fails the checksum test, do not panic. You may not need to download the ISO again. It is possible to use BitTorrent or wget to rebuild the ISO and download or fix the missing parts. See this article from the Damn Small Linux wiki for a very useful primer on the subject.