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Revision as of 08:55, 3 December 2016 by Tv (talk | contribs) (Input Drivers: synaptics is no more auto installed)
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Introduction

Available installation media

Mageia has two distinct installation media types:

  • Classical ISOs (DVD 32bit, DVD 64bit), which use the DrakX traditional installer. The 32bit and 64bit DVD ISOs contain all non-free drivers.
  • Live ISOs, which can be used to preview the distribution and (optionally) install Mageia on your hard drive. Live media come with either the KDE or GNOME desktop environments. The Live DVDs contain all supported locales and many packages.

All ISO images can be burned to a DVD or dumped on a USB flash drive.

For more information, please have a look at our installation media wiki page.

You will find the different download options on the Mageia 6 download page: direct (FTP and HTTP) and BitTorrent downloads are available.

The Mageia online repositories

The Mageia software sits in three different repositories/media, depending on the type of license applied to each package. Here's an overview of those repositories:

  • Core: The Core repository includes packages with free-open-source software, i.e. packages licensed under a free-open-source license, the set of the "Core" media along with "Core Release" and "Core Updates" are available by default.
  • Nonfree: The Nonfree repository includes packages that are free-of-charge, i.e. Mageia may redistribute them, but they contain closed-source software (hence the name - Nonfree). For example this repository includes NVIDIA and AMD/ATI graphics card proprietary drivers, firmware for various WiFi cards, etc.
    The Nonfree media set is added by default but not enabled by default.
  • Tainted: The Tainted repository includes packages released under a free license. The main criteria for placing packages in this repository is that they may infringe on patents and copyright laws in some countries, e.g. multimedia codecs needed to play various audio/video files; packages needed to play commercial video DVD, etc.
    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.
    This repository is only added for the convenience of the users. This repository is to Mageia what PLF was to Mandriva users or RPM Fusion is to Fedora users.

Please also note, that on a 64 bit system, the 32 bit repositories are also added. If the nonfree or tainted 64 bit repositories are enabled, the corresponding 32 bit repositories should also be enabled, as they are needed by some packages, such as skype or playonlinux.

Major new features

ARM support

The ARM port has been rebooted. See Feature:ARM_Port The core is available for armv5 & armv7. There's no traditional installer, it's for testers only.

Grub2 used as boot loader by default

The default boot loader is now grub2 instead of grub due to grub legacy not supporting:

  • ext4 file systems formatted with e2fsprogs 1.43,
  • XFS V5 format.

Grub2 integration with drakx tools has been enhanced. For example, it's possible to enable/disable os-prober (which can be quite slow when there's a lot of partitions and/or of foreign OSes).

On non UEFI machines (aka PC-BIOS), if the boot disk needs a GPT partition table, the installer will now create a BIOS boot partition

Installation

Support for Alpha/IA64/PPC/SPARC was dropped from the installer, but this is invisible to the users since Mageia never offered those architectures to install to.

Stage 1

Stage 2

  • We now use mutter instead of matchbox
  • the help has been ported from WebKit1 to WebKit2
  • we now support NVMe devices

UEFI

For further details on UEFI installation please refer to the wiki page Installing on systems with UEFI firmware.

Hardware support

  • New Architectures:
    • ARM v5 support is back
    • ARM v7 support is here
  • Input devices:
    • All the input devices like keyboard, mouse, touchpad and others are now handled though libinput version 1.5.2 library by default.
    • The X.org vmmouse driver is no more installed & used as it has been obsoleted by a kernel input driver

Localisation (l10n) / Internationalisation (i18n)

Manuals

  • The manuals for traditional installer and for the Mageia Control Center have been (partially) translated in many more languages, see our official documentation
  • For each missing localised screenshot in a HTML manual, the English screenshot is now used instead of no screenshot.
  • PDF and EPUB manuals will only be created when more than half of the needed localised screenshots for that manual are available

Software translations

New translations have been added, while others were improved. Thanks to our dedicated community of translators for their reliable work.

Package management

New RPM

RPM has been upgraded to 4.13.0. See http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.13.0 for details.

New alternative package manager: DNF

DNF has been introduced as an alternative to urpmi in Mageia 6.

For information on how to use it, please refer to the wiki page Using DNF.

PackageKit

PackageKit has been upgraded and switched to a new backend that dramatically improves the reliability and usability of PackageKit-based frontends, such as Apper (Plasma Desktop) and GNOME Software (GNOME).

The new PackageKit backend is completely independent from urpmi and can be managed through PackageKit frontends like Apper or through DNF (which shares repository configuration settings with it).

perl-URPM & urpmi

Urpmi tracks better package errors thanks to new rpm-4.13.

It now prefers http mirrors when using a mirrorlist, this avoids selecting an rsync mirror which prevents aria2 from being used.

Various bug fixes have landed.

Tools

MCC has been ported from gtk+2 to gtk+3. MCC's help has been ported from WebKit1 to WebKit2.

Other

Isodumper, a tool to write ISO images on memory devices, comes with a new graphical interface, using libyui. Thus Isodumper uses either GTK or Qt as graphical library. You have to choose which one you want to use, either isodumper-gtk or isodumper-qt. Isodumper comes also with a ncurses interface which can be used even if no X session is available. In case of upgrading, only the ncurses version will be available, you have to complete the installation.

Base system

Kernel & hardware support

  • Mageia 6 ships with kernel 4.8.

All hardware managed by kernel-4.8 is enabled.

Proprietary Nvidia drivers

Graphical environments

MageiaWelcome

It has been ported to python3 & gtk+3.

X Window System (X11)

Mageia 6 ships with X.Org 1.19.0.

Input Drivers

The keyboard & mouse drivers have been obsoleted by the generic evdev driver. The evdev driver was used by default forever in Mageia: it has replaced the formers for quite a long time. We were still packaging the keyboard & mouse drivers as fallbacks for years but they're no more included in Mageia. That means if someone was still relying on specific entries using those obsolete drivers, those section should be removed (XFdrake didnn't write such sections since 2009).

The libinput driver is now default generic input instead of the evdev driver. The later is still packaged in case someones needs it.

The libinput also replaces the synaptics driver. As such the synaptics driver is no more automatically installed when there's a touchpad.

KDE

KDE 4.14.3 & Plasma 5.6 are provided.

It has a specific Live-DVD or can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

Note: see our Errata about plasma 5.

GNOME

GNOME 3.22 is provided.

It has a specific Live-DVD or can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

For those prefering good old GNOME2, GNOME3 also provides a "Gnome Classic" session.

LXDE

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

XFCE

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

LXQt (replacing RazorQt)

LXQt is the successor of RazorQt. Upgrading from Mageia 5 to Mageia 6 will replace RazorQt with LXQt. For more details also check the Errata entry
It cannot be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer) as there is simply not enough space to include all desktop environments and the packages they depend upon.
Online media need to be added to enable selection during initial installation - this is explained in installer documentation

Mate

MATE 1.14.0 is provided. Some applications like mozo and mate-system-monitor are now GTK+3 due to upstream decision and moving to GTK+3.

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer). Due to DVD space capabilities for a full MATE Desktop experience users are suggested to install task-mate package after initial installation.

Cinnamon

It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).

Enlightenment

It comes in its E18 latest version based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries.

Light window managers

Mageia 6 also provides a plethora of small and efficient window managers such as afterstep, awesome, dwm, fluxbox, fvwm2, fvwm-crystal, i3, icewm, jwm, lightdm, matchbox, openbox, pekwm, sugar, swm, windowmaker.

Office apps

LibreOffice has been updated to 5.2. See official release notes for details.

Games

In the Mageia community, our love for free software extends to open source games. A huge effort has been made during the Mageia 6 release cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 6 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 6. The following section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game category.

New in Mageia 6

The following list is non-exhaustive.

Updates spotlight

The following list is non-exhaustive.

  • Adventure/Role-playing: Crawl, Tales of Maj'Eyal, Valyria Tear
  • Arcade: Neverball, StepMania, SuperTuxKart
  • Boards/Cards: Pioneers, TuxMathScrabble, TuxWordSmith
  • Puzzles: Berusky 1 & 2, Connectagram, Cuyo
  • Shooter: Urban Terror, Warsow, Xonotic
  • Simulation: FlightGear, Minetest
  • Strategy: 0 A.D., Battle for Wesnoth, Freeciv, MegaGlest, OpenTTD

Gaming platforms and tools

Mageia comes with a set of nice gaming platforms and tools, among which:

  • Lutris, a free and open source gaming platform for Linux. It lets you install and manage your games in a unified interface, e.g. Linux games from Desura or Steam, Windows games in Wine, open source games statically compiled, etc.
  • Vapor, a free and open source distribution platform for games developed with the free LÖVE 2D game engine
  • Steam, the well-known (non-free) distribution platform for commercial games
  • New emulators: DeSmuME, FCEUX, PCSX-Reloaded, PPSSPP, Zsnes (was dropped in Mageia 3)

Education

Mageia 6 still comes with gcompris which is based on the GTK+ toolkit. We were [1] among the donors in February, 2015, to improve the graphical interface. So stay tuned; we may have some really cool stuff coming together with a Qt based version.

Software Development

GCC has been updated to 5.3.2, GDB to 7.11 and Valgrind to 3.11.0. LLVM has been updated to 3.8.0. LLDB is now packaged as well.

Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions, such as Qt 5.6.0 and GTK+ 3.20.4. An important work has been done to simplify the Java stack which was hard to maintain in Mageia 5.

Python3 has been updated to 3.5.2, Python to 2.7.12, and when possible, all Python modules are provided for Python 2 and Python 3.

Perl has been updated to 5.22.2.

libvirt and virt-manager now support UEFI in VMs (one needs to install edk2-ovmf-x64).

Firebird has been updated to 3.0.0.

IPython has been updated to 5.0 (LTS version).


KDE Frameworks 5

Mageia 6 brings KDE Frameworks 5 version 5.6.

Miscellaneous

Owncloud software is limited in his ability to upgrade skipping intermediate versions. Please read his wiki page for OwnCloud#Upgrading instructions before updating.

Upgrading from Mageia 5

Please also read the known issues page.

Upgrading from Mageia 5 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 5 (such as rpm and urpmi). Upgrading from Mageia 4 or another distribution is not supported.

If 3rd party repositories, such as Google, have been added during the use of Mageia 5, be sure to make a backup/copy of /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg.

There are several ways to upgrade from Mageia 5:

Warning: Upgrading an existing install using a LiveCD is NOT supported due to the LiveCD’s 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 6, you have to do a complete installation. Direct upgrade is not supported.


Upgrading via the Internet

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). Both methods are outlined below.

Fully update your system and check you have enough free space (at least 2 GB, depending of your configuration) before starting upgrade.

Upgrading online, using mgaonline (GUI)

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. http://doc.mageia.org/mcc/6/en/content/MageiaUpdate.html

2. In Mageia Control Centre - Software Management - Configure Updates Frequency, make sure that the option "Check for newer default releases" is selected. http://doc.mageia.org/mcc/6/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 re-boot, the blue upgrade icon should appear when Mageia Online next checks for updates.


Alternatively, you can launch the upgrade process by entering in a terminal:

su
mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=6


It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 6 distribution, configure Mageia media sources and start migration.

Upgrading online, using urpmi (CLI)

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 in grub's menu.lst file and then rebooting the system to get a login prompt.

It is wise to run "script upgrade_log.txt" to capture the upgrade messages just in case a failure occurs. Use "exit" to quit out of "script".

Here are the general upgrade steps:

  • Remove all of the existing media sources on your system by executing this command as root in terminal:
su
urpmi.removemedia -a
  • Add the Mageia 6 online sources, either:
    • Using the MIRRORLIST method (which will select a mirror automatically based on your geographical location):
    su
    urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist 'http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.6.$ARCH.list'
    (urpmi knows what to substitute for $ARCH)
    • Using a specific media mirror:
    su
    urpmi.addmedia --distrib <mirror_url>
    You can get the mirror_url using the Mageia mirrors web application.
  • Finally start upgrading:
su
urpmi --replacefiles --auto-update --auto
  • It's best to run the above command twice because in the first run some packages may be downloaded but not installed.
Note:
It is sometimes a good idea to test the upgrade before carrying it on.

With this command: urpmi --replacefiles --auto-update --auto --download-all --test all the packages are downloaded and the upgrade simulated only.
If the result is good, then upgrade for real with the command urpmi --replacefiles --auto-update --auto --download-all

Using the traditional Mageia 6 DVD to Upgrade

You can use the traditional (so non-Live) Mageia 6 DVD to do clean installs but also to upgrade from Mageia 5.

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 32bits packages in an otherwise 64bits install, because the 64bits iso will only contain the 64bits packages, so the upgrade is likely to fail if you do not add online repositories.

Moreover, it is possible that Mageia 5 may have received an update to a later version of software than that available on the ISO. When this happens, the upgrade may fail to complete. Since, at the time the ISOs are tested, it is impossible to anticipate which Mageia 5 packages may be updated in the future, 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.

Known issues

See the Errata page.

Bug reporting

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.

Obsoleted packages