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Contents

Introduction

Although we put a lot of energy and time into fixing bugs, we can't fix them all unless we delay the release for a very long time. Actually, we delayed the release for a very long time already, for various reasons including late work on UEFI support in the release cycle.

The list below contains the issues our contributors want to highlight, to decrease the chance users are unexpectedly hit by one or more of them.

It is impossible to list every single issue that might still be valid, though.

For a full list of all bugs and enhancement requests that have been filed against installer or the release process, and are not yet (confirmed to be) solved, please see the full list of open installer and release bugs

For a full list of all bugs that have been filed against packages, and are not yet (confirmed to be) solved, see all open cauldron "MGA5TOO" package bug reports (This list needs to be adjusted as soon as version can be set to "5", without removing the cauldron "MGA5TOO" bugs.)

The bugs listed in this page are valid by the day of the release of Mageia 5. If you're reading this several weeks or months after the release, there's a high chance that bugs have been fixed via an update, whenever possible.

Classic Installer DVDs

UEFI or BIOS/legacy mode

Note:
Many computers have UEFI, but can also boot in legacy (BIOS) mode. If it boots in the wrong mode for your install or upgrade, the install or upgrade will fail. Read more below

If the boot screen has F1, F2 etc. buttons at the bottom of the screen, like here http://doc.mageia.org/installer/4/en/content/images/dx-welcome.png then you booted in legacy (BIOS) mode.

If the boot screen does not have those buttons, like this boot screen https://wiki.mageia.org/mw-en/images/5/57/KO-grub2-installer1.png then you booted in EFI mode.

Please read more here Installing on systems with UEFI firmware#BIOS or UEFI firmware

Live CD/DVD

Note:
on some (often older) hardware, LiveCD/DVDs can take a long time to load, show a black screen for a while and/or seem to hang on an error message. However, have some patience: the Live will continue to load in almost all cases and work fine.

Boot options selection

  • Pressing F2-F6 to change kernel options also moves selection from boot to install (mga#5263). Delete manually the word install on the kernel options line to run the live mode instead of installation, or just switch to the "boot" line using the arrow keys.
  • The "Boot from Hard Disk" option in the boot menu of live media will not work if the live media is booted in a virtualbox guest or the live media is dumped into USB flash device. (mga#16038)

GNOME live ISOs

  • There are several obscure situations where the boot process ends with a message "Oh no! Something has gone wrong". This is more likely when booting from DVD than from USB, and more likely when choosing 'Live' from the boot menu rather than 'Install'. If you cannot get round this, use the Classic ISO instead to install Gnome.
  • After install, booting into Gnome may fail right after giving a root password and a user name + user password. Rebooting again was seen to solve this. See comment 4 in mga#14489 and mga#13687.
  • Due to a misconfiguration of the GTK+2 theme in GNOME live ISOs, GTK+2 applications including LibreOffice and Firefox may appear with the default upstream Raleigh ("blocky") theme instead of the Adwaita theme which is default in GNOME. This affect both live ISOs and systems installed using the live ISOs, but an update will be issued quickly after the release to fix this problem on installed systems. An alternative is to select the Adwaita theme for GTK+ applications using gnome-tweak-tool.

KDE live ISOs

No prominent issue known at the moment that would be specific to KDE live ISOs.

All live ISOs

Computers with hybrid graphics

The Live ISOs can fail to start the graphical interface (X) on laptops that have both an integrated GPU and a discrete graphical card. This is the case with laptops using the NVIDIA Optimus technology, for example.

You can try to add a special boot parameter we created for the occasion: optimus which activates a workaround.
Note: in the KDE Live ISOs it is known to have the potential to make KDE start in the new, empty, activity instead of the default one. Well, better that than a black screen.

You can also try a combination of the rd.blacklist= and xdriver= kernel parameters.

  • For Intel + NVIDIA to force the use of the intel driver: rdblacklist=nouveau rdblacklist=nvidia xdriver=intel
  • If it still fails and if in UEFI mode, try disabling the power management: rdblacklist=nouveau rdblacklist=nvidia xdriver=intel nouveau.runpm=0

This seems only required by some newer or rare chipsets, which are not yet fully supported by nouveau. See mga#16245.

  • If it fails (and if not in UEFI mode, because there's no vesa driver in UEFI mode), you can try the vesa driver: rdblacklist=nouveau rdblacklist=nvidia xdriver=vesa

See mga#15734.

For optimus, more information at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_5_Errata#NVIDIA_Optimus_support_and_known_limitations

Installer Issues

Unless you're sure you're installing on an old BIOS computer, please read this, first UEFI or BIOS/legacy mode

Dual boot with Windows 7 (maybe 8 too when installed in Legacy BIOS mode)

Grub doesn't detect Windows 7/8 on some systems

See bug 16138 On some occasions, grub doesn't add Windows to the boot menu during install.
This can be fixed after booting into Mageia, by

  • going to MCC => Boot => "Setup Boot System"
  • click "Next"
  • select "Add"
  • choose "Other OS (Windows)"
  • select the correct Windows bootloader partition (most likely /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2) from the drop-down list.

UEFI installs

Because there were so many improvements at a late stage in Mageia 5 development, we have not been able to update our official installer manual. For instructions on how to perform an UEFI install, please read Installing_on_systems_with_UEFI_firmware which we keep up-to-date.

As a general point, the ESP (EFI System Partition) needs to be mounted on /boot/EFI. If you use Custom disc partitioning, this should be pre-selected from the drop-down list of mount points; if you do not see it, simply type it in manually.

For both Live and Classic installs, both the bootloader configuration and later bootloader installation may take a full 10 minutes (each) to complete, showing a blank window. Do not despair, sit it out. This has something to do with os-prober, and remains to be cracked. The vast majority of testers haven't encountered this issue, thankfully.

Note:
Some computer vendors made it impossible to boot your just installed Mageia. We cannot solve that, see: EFI firmware of some vendors is hardcoded to use MS Windows by default

Partitioning in Raid volume

Installation onto a new bare RAID 0 system may have problems if you try to create a 5th partition although works normally with fewer partitions. A work-around is that the classical installer can happily work with pre-existing MS-Windows partitions within a RAID 0 drive, allowing manual resizing of the main windows partition, deleting un-needed Windows partitions (e.g. a drive 'D') and replacing them with linux partitions, at and above a total of 5 partitions. Note that the MS-Windows must be completely and cleanly shut down first (mga#15791). Another work-around is to partition with gparted from another installed system or a Live system.

Partitioning in XFS format

[5.1] As XFS format evolved, new XFS partition formating will result with partitions no more managed by Grub (Legacy or 2). To use XFS format for the root partition, you have to create a small partition in ext4 and mount it as /boot (see mga#19790)

NTP syncing always activated

At the end of the installation, a summary shows a setting about NTP syncing (click on "Timezone", then Next/Forward).

That is ineffective: NTP syncing is currently activated anyway.

Please see Setting time in "Software Issues". More info at mga#15534.

Computers with hybrid graphics

Computers with hybrid graphics (for example intel integrated GPU + discrete NVIDIA card, aka Optimus technology) can fail to start X if both intel and nouveau/nvidia drivers are used. Our tools are not very good at the moment at handling this situation: they see two cards, so they think there are two screens, and it fails quite badly afterwards. A way that worked for several testers is to only configure the intel GPU, finish the installation, and reboot.

Note: some computers allow to disable one of the two GPUs in the BIOS or UEFI configuration. Doing so makes the situation simpler, since only one GPU is then seen by mageia.

For optimus, more information at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_5_Errata#NVIDIA_Optimus_support_and_known_limitations

Upgrade Issues

Possible "installation transactions failed"

When upgrading from Mageia 4, some packages that you have installed are not present on the DVD image. To avoid to get failures because new version of packages are not found, you have to add repositories available online. Thus all uptodate packages will be found. If not, you will get message like " "nnn" installation transactions failed" (where "nnn"is a number). See mga#19754

System user ID boundary change affects logging

Since Mageia 5, the system user id boundary has changed from 500 to 1000. This is in line with other distros. While such a distinction is, in itself, a poor design, we are somewhat stuck with it. If your users created before upgrade are in the range 500 to 1000 they will still work as expected and should still be displayed in graphical login managers etc. however logging to a private, per-user journal is no longer possible for such users. If you wish to see the journal output for your user, simply run as root:

journalctl -b _UID=$UID 

where $UID is your user identifier. There is currently no configuration option to change this arrangement and, as such, if you feel you would like your private journal back, we would recommend doing a one-off conversion of your user account to change the UID to something > 1000 (it would also make sense to renumber your group id too if you use a private groups setup which is our default).

Network interfaces naming

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 the bug report for more details: mga#12316 .

Note: at least one user reported that after upgrading via urpmi or the blue "upgrade" icon in the system tray, their eth0 interface was renamed permanently to a name using the new scheme.

Check free space on /boot

When /boot is on a separate partition (i.e. for encrypted system) it may be small and be pretty filled up by automatic kernel updates. While upgrading the system, if the partition becomes full, the process may fail in last step when running mkinitrd.

Thus, if your partition is separate, check that you have at least 40 MB free on it.

WORKAROUND: You can switch to tty2 (Alt + F2) where there is a working prompt, manually clean up space, then issue the exact same command the installer say failed, switch back to installer, press next and it finished (mga#12012).

Upgrading Mariadb

There is an error in the upgrade message. The command "mysql_upgrade" needs a running mariab, Use " systemctl status mysqld " If it's not running, use "systemctl start mysqld" then run "mysql_upgrade" (resp. "mysql_upgrade -p" when you already assgined a root password to it) and if desired "systemctl stop mysqld". More info on their WEB -site: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb/upgrading-from-mariadb-55-to-mariadb-100

Software Issues

Internationalization

  • For GNOME, a default input method is not set in desktop session. You need to set it manually in Settings (mga#15793).
  • If user's language is Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, and installs pcmanfm-qt or LXQT, pcmanfm-qt will not show file and folder names in thumbnails view and icon view because of the new default CJK font "Source Han". A workground is to select another default font in appearance setting, or to install another font package that provides CJK characters, e.g. google-droid-sans-fonts, fonts-ttf-chinese-opendesktop, fonts-ttf-japanese(for Japanese only), or fonts-ttf-korean(for korean only). The package fonts-otf-source-han can be removed later (mga#16043).

Spice vdagent (KVM/XEN)

for spice-vdagent to work, you will have to boot guests with kernel parameter "pci=nomsi". if you don't, the spice guest socket will not be instantiated and thus spice-vdagent will not be able to connect to the host interface.

Enlightenment

Mageia tools do not start under E18 due to missing polkit agent

Enlightenment does not start applications from /etc/xdg/autostart by default, which means that no polkit agent will be started. Since Mageia 4 all Mageia configuration tools have been ported to polkit.

Users will need to enable a polkit agent either via the menu => settings => all => applications => autostart applications and enable a polkit agent. Or enable autostart via the command line:

 echo "/etc/xdg/autostart/polkit-mate-authentication-agent-1.desktop" >> ~/.e/e/applications/startup/.order

See mga#13029 for more details.

KDE 4

  • Using Onboard (on screen keyboard) Accessibility Package in KDE will cause the opening of KDE GUI tools as root to take up to 120 seconds. If you regularly use KDE GUI applications as root e.g. Dolphin, Kate, Kwrite etc. and wish to use Onboard then the delay may be removed by uninstalling the qtatspi-plugin package. This will disable one or two subtle features of Onboard which will probably go unnoticed (mga#11975).
  • If you have one or more numbers in your login password in kdm, and you normally use your numeric keyboard for numbers , then it is advisable to install the numlock package if it isn't already installed. That one will make sure your numeric keyboard is on the next time you login in kdm (mga#15719).
  • Virtualbox does not seem to add the current user to the vboxusers group when it's installed. This causes problems for Virtualbox to see any connected device via USB.

If you add your user to that group and reboot the computer entirely this problem will vanish. For more information, see (mga#16881)

KDE Frameworks 5 / Plasma 5

  • Plasma 5 is not one of the supported desktops in our installer, and is not present on the installation DVDs. It can still be installed from the network installation sources (package: task-plasma5), but it's not recommended except for testing purposes, at the moment. The current version is quite old due to the extended freeze period in Mageia 5's development, and integration is not as good as that of KDE 4 at the moment (although a lot of integration work has been done already!). However, a big update to this desktop environment will probably be made later to Mageia 5 (but don't take this as a promise! He who writes theses words is not he who will decide and do the work!).
  • Plasma 5 cannot be installed along with KDE 4. Installing task-plasma5 will ask to remove KDE 4.

GNOME

  • Please notice that the current version of GNOME *requires* the composite extension of the X server to be enabled. If this is not the case, either from unsupported X drivers or if you have explicitly disabled "translucency" during the installation or within the Mageia Control Center, the gnome session will fail at login time.
  • While touchpad tap-to-click is enabled in the installer, it is disabled by default in GNOME. You can enable it in the Mouse and Touchpad preferences.
  • Some devices, in particular cameras and phones, use the MTP protocol to communicate with the PC over an USB connection. These devices aren't recognized by default in Files. The gvfs-mtp package must be installed separately for them to work:
 urpmi gvfs-mtp

LXQt & RazorQt

LXQt is the successor of RazorQt. It looks the same, although it adds quite a lot of desktop functionality. Most of the applications come from LXDE, but as Qt version. RazorQt has been obsoleted, and people will get LXQt after an upgrade to Mageia 5 if they had razor-qt before.

For cauldron users, manual removal and re-installation of the lxmenu-data package might be necessary.
The versioning of the lxmenu-data package was corrected, and if you have version 0.7 or 0.8 installed, you would need to

 rpm -e --nodeps lxmenu-data; urpmi lxmenu-data

to receive the corrected lxmenu-data-0.1.4-1.mga5. This is not necessary when upgrading from Mageia 4 or installing Mageia 5 directly.

More information on LXQt is available via User:Doktor5000#Replacing_Razor-qt_with_LXQt

LXDE

  • In Mageia 4, we used menu from /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu because /etc/xdg/menus/lxde-applications.menu was not available. So if the file ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf, in section [Environment], contained "menu_prefix=lxde-", it had not importance. In Mageia 5, LXQt provides a file /etc/xdg/menus/lxde-applications.menu, so, to keep usage of /etc/xdg/menus/applications.menu, some modifications have been made that can cause a problem after upgrading from Mageia 4: if there is no menu available after log into LXDE, open the file ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE/desktop.conf, in section [Environment]:
Find "menu_prefix=lxde-", change it to "menu_prefix=" (without quotes). After log out and log in again, the menu will reappear.
  • If the screensaver displays GTK message: failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module", you can get rid of this message by installing the package lib64canberra-gtk0, for X86_64 arch, or libcanberra-gtk0, for i586 arch, see mga#15176.
  • Shutdown or reboot can take more time than normally needed, due to LXDM not properly handling SIGTERM signal sent by systemd, see mga#15168. This can be workarounded by switching to a different display manager and enabling it via drakdm
  • When logging into LXDE for the first time, the screen saver may lock the screen immediately, see mga#15460.
  • If you use autologin, the keyboard displayed in LXPanel is US even if another layout is configured, see mga#14622.
  • If you enable displaying trash on the desktop in desktop preferences, desktop icons tab, you will have two trash icons on the desktop, see mga#14210.

Cinnamon

  • In a virtual machine, Cinnamon may start in fallback mode if the VM has no 2D graphics acceleration support (mga#15991)
  • The fonts appearing on the default wallpaper may be too dark to be read easily (mga#15843)

Mate

  • Due to Bluez5 incompatibility, Template:Pkg and Template:Pkg packages were dropped and Mate Desktop does not provide Bluetooth support natively. Mate developers suggest to use Blueman which is almost fully migrated to Bluez5. Blueman with bluez5 support is at its alpha stage but many functions, like pairing, receiving/sending files are working. Template:Pkg is now in repositories and can be installed:
urpmi blueman
  • There is an issue with panel drawer applet. When drawer applet added to panel and filled with other applets, it stretches along the screen and drawer icon may disappear. This is a long known issue by upstream and still being investigated. See Mate GitHub Issue 44 and Mate GitHub Issue 120 for further information.

XFCE

In Mageia 5 pnmixer is used as the default mixer app, instead of xfce4-mixer which was default in Mageia 4. So after an upgrade you may end up with two mixer applets. As they can coexist best decide which you like better and disable or uninstall the other one (mga#15784).

dkms-iscsitarget

dkms-iscsitarget is deprecated in favour of targetcli

autofs

To configure the autofs "/net/hostname" feature you would have commented out the /net line in /etc/autofs/auto.master. However the current line /net -hosts is wrong.

to make it work replace the line with

/net /etc/autofs/auto.net

Relates to a RedHat bug: rhbz#1038356.

sddm

sddm will show the US flag for the keyboard layout, but when typing the first letter it should switch to the correct one (mga#15357).

Grub2

Support in Drakboot

Grub2 is supported by drakboot (Mageia's boot configuration tool, used in installers and the Mageia Control Center). If you need more advanced options, it is recommended to use one of the native grub2 methods described in /usr/share/doc/grub2/README.Mageia (mga#9627).

Kernel options

like some special graphic modes may need to be added either through the drakboot tool or manually in /etc/default/grub.
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.

Grub2 and UEFI

With UEFI system, we will install Grub2 without any choice. The bootloader will be installed in the ESP partition (mga#16058). There is no more reference to MBR.

Multi-booting (PC-BIOS)

When 'installing' grub2 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 legacy or grub2 used in a dedicated master bootloader or from another system.

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

title Mageia 5 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 5 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-5 (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 5' {
search --no-floppy --label --set=root mageia-5
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.

Minimal installs

When a minimal install of grub2 is needed it may be installed with urpmi grub2 --no-recommends 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 a grub2 theme package - just install or un-install these at will, run update-grub in a terminal 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 to be selected.
For this KDM needs to be selected as login manager, this can be done via selecting it in drakdm via Mageia Control Center

LibreOffice

Due to an upstream bug, LibreOffice Calc 4.4.0.3 seems not to save images put in spreadsheet headers (mga#15234). Solved with update. We have now 4.4.7.

Evolution

Because of a missing dependency when evolution is installed, accounts requiring SSL/TLS can not be configured: Evolution does not ask for password (mga#15971). To fix it, either wait for an update that will add the missing dependency, or manually install either:

  • lib64glib-networking (64bit machine) or
  • libglib-networking (32bit machine).

Solved with an update.

Roundcubemail

The new php-5.6 doesn't let Roundcubemail find the certificates and as a result the verification of the user at log-in fails. To resolve this problem, you need to edit file /etc/php.ini and ad this line in section [openssl]

openssl.cafile=/etc/pki/tls/certs/cyrus-imapd.pem

Mageia guests under KVM

Imported from Mageia 4 errata

  • Using a QXL video card model for a KVM virtual machine may cause a Mageia 4 guest to crash when switching virtual terminals (mga#14607). 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.

Drakfirewall fails to open mountd ports for NFS

When configuring the firewall with drakfirewall and checking "NFS" so that the ports are open for NFS, it can fail to open the right port (seems to open the default 4003 port instead of the actual ports) (mga#14550). Fixed with drakx-net 2.24.2.

Setting time

Because clock synchronization is active by default (see NTP syncing always activated in "Installer Issues"), setting time is impossible both in Mageia Control Center and in KDE's Time and Date configuration.

A workaround is to turn it off with the command (root authentication needed):

timedatectl set-ntp false

Thereafter, MCC and KDE configuration functions will be able to set time and date again.

Please note that there may be some delay until panel clocks are updated -- new time can be verified immediately with "date" or "timedatectl". Also, setting a later time may lock the screen if the screensaver is enabled.

Additional info at mga#15534.

bacula misses a dependency on /usr/sbin/bacula-checkconf

bacula-fd currently misses a dependency on bacula-dir for /usr/sbin/bacula-checkconf and hence the start of the bacual-fd service will fail. This has been discovered during release freeze, and a fix was already committed to SVN, but until an update is released for this the workaround is to manually install bacula-dir. For details see mga#16022

Problems using PulseAudio dbus-protocol module

When other pulseaudio modules or applications try to use the pulseaudio dbus-module, they will error out saying that the dbus module is not loaded, even when that is the case. There is currently no workaround known, but our pulseaudio maintainer is aware about the issue. For more details see mga#14709.

Lightdm has no background image on first boot just plain grey - XFCE & MATE

Lightdm has no background image on first boot just plain grey - XFCE & MATE. The background is OK after the first login.

Additional info at mga#15722.

Solved with lightdm-gtk-greeter-2.0.1-1.mga5 update.

X via startx exits to a black screen (on some hardware configurations)

After starting X using startx, it exits to a black screen with NV11 NVIDIA graphics adapters and possibly some other hardware configurations.

Additional info at mga#15662.

Installing additional software packages from a USB memory stick

If you copied one of the classic installer ISOs to a USB memory stick (either by using the 'isodumper' utility or by using the 'dd' command) and used that to perform your initial installation, the installer recognises that memory stick as a CD/DVD and automatically adds 'cdrom' to the list of media used by the Mageia software installation tools (the GUI, rpmdrake, or the command, urpmi).

If you subsequently use the urpmi command to install additional software packages when the USB stick isn't plugged in, it will prompt you to insert the media, then output an error message:

Use of uninitialized value in subroutine entry at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.20.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/Net/DBus/Binding/Connection.pm line 257

This error message appears to be spurious and can be ignored. However, urpmi then waits for you to insert a CD/DVD, and does not recognise your USB stick as an acceptable substitute.

Three alternative workarounds for this are:

  • Insert the USB stick before running the urpmi command
  • Use urpme to remove the 'perl-Hal-Cdroms' package. This causes urpmi to ask you to press Enter when you have inserted the media, rather than trying to detect it automatically
  • Disable or remove the 'cdrom' entries in the list of media used by urpmi. This is only applicable if you have added online repositories to the list of media, and don't want to install packages from the USB stick

The GUI software installer, rpmdrake, is not affected by this issue.

Note that if you install via a UEFI boot, the USB stick is only recognised as a CD/DVD if you select the default 'Install from DVD' option.

Additional info at mga#16142.

Netflix and other sites that require widevine plugin are not working

Widevine, a browser plugin to allow playback of DRM-protected videos, will not install successfully in the Firefox version distributed by Mageia. Also you need to make manual installation of widevine for the chromium-browser distributed by Mageia. See mga#20617 and mga#17449 for more details.

Follow the required procedure to install widevine in the browser of your election.

Firefox

With firefox closed:

  • As root edit the file /usr/lib/firefox/distribution/distribution.ini (or /usr/lib64/firefox/distribution/distribution.ini for x86_64 systems)
  • Change the lines
id=
version=

to

id=org.mageia
version=5
  • Save the changes
  • Launch Firefox
  • Go to about:addons -> Plugins, wait until confirmation that widevine is installed
  • You can check at https://demo.castlabs.com/ if widevine-protected videos (the DRM option) are working

All the sites that need widevine and allowing Firefox for linux (with or without faking user agent) must work.

Note:
This also install the Cisco's OpenH264 plugin

Chromium Browser

For chromium-browser, download and unpack widevine library and copy to Chromium browser's library directory, see mga#17449 comment 12 for more information.

Also Blogdrake, the Spanish community have created a script that makes this for you.

  • Right click in this link to download the get-widevine.sh script
  • Open terminal emulator
  • Give execution rights to the script
 chmod a+rx get-widevine.sh
  • Run the script
 ./get-widevine.sh
  • Provide root password when required
  • You can check at https://demo.castlabs.com/ if widevine-protected videos (the DRM option) are working.
Note:
Some sites could require fake the useragent

Due to packaging issues flash plugin not works in Chromium Browser

See mga#20196 for more information.

Hardware Issues

Random freezes and WLAN problems on Intel BayTrail systems

Intel Baytrail systems have a hardware bug, that as is known at kernel versions above 4.1 causes some problems (see kernelbug#109051). Until a permanent solution, it is suggested to add the kernel option "intel_idle.max_cstate=1". For adding kernel options see the instructions here (How to set up kernel options). It was also reported that adding the kernel option solve WLAN problems under BayTrail systems.

Additional info at mga#18881 and mga#18843

X might fail to start for nvidia graphics cards using nvidia340 driver (GeForce 8100 to GeForce 415)

After an upgrade to Mageia 5 or also on fresh installation, during the first boot the X server might fail to start, if you use the nvidia340 driver (for GeForce 8100 to GeForce 415 cards)
To fix this, either switch to runlevel 3 using init 3 as root
or appending 3 to the boot options when booting. See How to set up kernel options for more details on how to do that.
After logging in as root, run drakx11 and select the nvidia driver again, it should then be downloaded and installed, after a reboot your X session should start as usual.

See also: https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9885 and https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=10019

X might fail to start for Intel "Skylake" based systems

See also mga#17174 for more details. After an otherwise successful installation of Mageia 5, the X server might fail to start if your system has an Intel "Skylake" CPU.
To use the integrated Intel HD graphics, you need to install updates including newer kernel 4.1.x during or after the installation before being able to use the X server with the integrated Intel HD graphics.
See our update advisories MGASA-2015-0386 and MGASA-2015-0435 for more details about those kernel updates.

In addition, experimental support for the i915 driver needs to be enabled. This option is not enabled in the kernels currently shipping with Mageia 5, but will probably be enabled by default in one of next kernel updates.

One way of adding this support is by adding the following line to the GRUB Kernel options:

i915.preliminary_hw_support=1

See How to set up kernel options for more details on how to do that.

NOTE! As of kernel 4.1.15-1.mga5 released in update: MGASA-2016-0005, the i915.preliminary_hw_support is enabled by default.

Full skylake support will only be possible with kernel >= 4.3.

No ethernet and/or no Wifi Intel "Skylake" based systems

If you are doing a standard installation and you have a Skylake Ethernet and/or a Skylake Wireless chip, these will not be supported by standard install and you are not going to have network support in the final installation. This can make upgrading the kernel for the i915 Skylake graphics too.

This happens for example on newest Intel NUC systems (tests were made with a NUC6i3SYH i3-6100U but any SYH and SYK should have the same skylake chips).

You have to download these packages from another system to the usb device.

These are the packages I installed (I'm assuming a 64bit installation, since, well, we're in 2016 and you have a brand-new hardware). After installing them you need to reboot into the new kernel:

  • kernel-desktop-4.1.15-2.mga5-1-1¹
  • kernel-firmware-20150722-1.mga5
  • kernel-firmware-nonfree-20151018-1.mga5

¹you need to see if the installer choose kernel-desktop or kernel-server

The first and second rpm comes from the core update channel, the latter from the nonfree update channel.

NVIDIA Optimus support and known limitations

First, see the part about hybrid graphics in the LiveDVDs and Installer above sections.

For owners of computers using Optimus, we regret it is not handled out of the box, but you can make it work in most cases. Here are the steps that worked for most testers, it's not that hard actually because we worked on it the best we could:

  • Configure only the intel graphical card, or vesa/fbdev if your chipset is not well supported.
  • Install the bumblebee package. It will ask you to choose between bumblebee-nouveau (free driver) and bumblebee-nvidia (non-free driver, if you have activated the nonfree media).
  • When needing to use the NVIDIA GPU, start your application with
primusrun name_of_application

or

optirun name_of_application

Some people like to deactivate vsync. The person writing this note doesn't know if it really improves performance or not, just try it if you have poor performance with the above:

vblank_mode=0 primusrun name_of_application

Known bug: Since kernel 3.19, the nvidia driver, once loaded, is not unloaded anymore when the applications using it stop (mga#16094). Which means that the discrete card stays powered. There is a way to turn it off manually, thankfully. As root:

rmmod nvidia && tee <<<OFF /proc/acpi/bbswitch

Display corruption once the cursor moves

With some hardwares and only with 64 bits ISO, the installer screen displays some corruption where the mouse cursor is moved. Workaround: select another resolution on the kernel line, for example with vga=787 (15bpp) instead of vga=788 (mga#15253).

default cpufreq governor is performance, users of AMD and elder Intel may want to switch to ondemand

See also mga#13368, mga#14584 and https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=9801
The default cpufreq governor has been set to performance via /etc/sysconfig/cpupower, as current Intel CPUs do only support either performance or powersave governors.
With the previous default governor ondemand the cpufreq service would fail during boot.

Users with AMD CPUs or Intel CPUs before year 2009 might need to switch to the ondemand governor, as otherwise their CPU will run at full speed
and hence full heat the whole time. The governor can be easily changed during runtime as root via

cpupower frequency-set -g ondemand

and the current frequency and the currently set governor can be queried via

cpupower frequency-info

To make the change permanent, you still need to edit /etc/sysconfig/cpupower and replace performance with ondemand.

Proprietary AMD/ATI driver (fglrx) might be problematic with new Xorg

Workaround is to use Xorg ati or vesa driver.

Possible boot failure from DVD with some Radeon hardware

In some obscure situations, booting from DVD may abort with the message "gdm-Xorg-:0[1519]: (EE) AIGLX error: dlopen of /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so failed (/usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so: undefined symbol: _glapi_tls_Dispatch)". The solution for the moment is to boot the ISO from USB.

The touchscreen is not recognized as a touchsceen device, but behaves as a normal mouse

In this case you can try to install x11-driver-input-libinput and restart the system. (mga#18854)

Wacom Tablet "BAMBOO PAD CTH-301 / K" does not work

The kernel is not ready to manage it. We may be wait until kernel 4.1 to manage it (mga#15459).

OpenGL 2.0 incompatible with older hardware under Nouveau and KDE

Some older video cards, even if advertised as OpenGL 2.0 compatible, may require a lower OpenGL 1.2 setting in KDE settings / Desktop Effects / Advanced / Compositing Type.

If the screen is unreadable upon KDE start, try disabling effects with Alt+Shift+F12 and adjust the above setting. Desktop effects can be enabled again with that same shortcut.

More info at mga#15462 and http://userbase.kde.org/Desktop_Effects_Performance (see the "OpenGL Version" topic).

Some scanners do not work with usblp loaded

Some scanners, such as the Canon Pixma MP250 have been reported to fail working if the module usblp is loaded. Workaround is to run "rmmod usblp" as root, or add 'blacklist usblp' to /etc/modprobe.conf, to prevent it from loading on each boot.

EFI firmware of some vendors is hardcoded to use MS Windows by default

See bug 19112, comment 9

Some Medion, HP and Lenovo computers hardcoded their EFI firmware to use Windows as default, efibootmgr cannot change that.