FOSS Force has learned that Mageia will soon officially announce the release of the stable version of Mageia 5, most likely later today. According to a source within the organization, the ISO images were pushed to the distro’s main mirror at about 7 P.M. EST yesterday. According to our source, the developers are now just waiting for the images to be available on all mirrors before making the official announcement.
Here at FOSS Force, we’ve found Mageia 5 available for download at The Linux Kernel Archives. 32 and 64 bit downloads are available for both the GNOME and KDE4 desktops, in both CD and DVD formats. We are in the process of downloading the 32 bit “live CD” image of the distro with KDE and plan to have screenshots and a review in the next couple of days.
The last version of the distro, Mageia 4, was released in February of last year.
Mageia began as a fork of Mandriva, a commercial distro which was one of the most popular Linux distros during the first five or six years of the 21st century. In recent years, Mandriva’s popularity waned and the company behind it was liquidated late last month. Although several distros began as forks of Mandriva, Mageia would be the heir apparent to carry the old Mandrake/Mandriva torch for a couple of reasons: It was founded by a group of longtime Mandriva developers who had been laid off due to Mandriva’s financial difficulties and it had been adopted by Mandriva as the platform for its Business Server.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
Linux is so screwed with systemd, that is such a tradegy. I so want a decent Linux that matters to fight back and lose systemd and make it a permanent goal to stay “Linus Linux” instead of “Lennart Linux”. 🙁
Mageia 5 quick glance
I’ve tried Mageis before, (release 4.x) and it didn’t seem to have as polished a feel and look as version 5 does, I’ll have to fire up the old spare laptop and give this another try, maybe I can find a place for it in my lineup of refurbished machines.
As for systemd and it ruining Linux? well most times its the masses that speak to these developers regarding what they want-like-need in their system. So eventually, even if its adopted throughout the entire FOSS world, if the “People” aren’t happy with it, they will create and substitutue whatever they wish, and the more the masses turn to the new offering the less important systemd will become. But that’s IF people are willing to do more than just BMG about it. (B*tch – Moan & Groan!) So I guess for now systemd can’t be THAT bad because I don’t see anyone from the open souce community offering an alternative. Guess its just a waiting game…..
Not so simple. Many whom are against systemd on Debian user list had their say, a lot of it was shutdown, ala censored.
The init system wasn’t broken, but the X Windows systems is another matter.
With systemd, it is not just about the init system any more, it has over reached in to other areas and it IS causing user grief.
Those that can make the most difference the situation keep sticking their heads in the sand; it is very unlikely to get fixed any time soon if at all. The alternative would be a BSD based system.
So much is broken with systemd and the inclusion of other sub-systems and that is just the start, more is to come, much more, if you’ve read the blog of Lennart perhaps you would understand.
There are also issues with BTRFS, but that’s another matter; that being linked intricately with the Linux kernel (just like systemd), and that will mean that a BTRFS file system may have trouble mounting on even a slightly different kernel within the same distribution. So, that’s another abomination with Linux that is very sadly taking place. The ext4 file system is very good, but it isn’t as good as ZFS and unfortunately ZFS on Linux has limitations due to the license. However ZFS is no problem with BSD, so there is an out from Linux to something else and that something else could very well simply be a BSD variant.
For my opinion, Mageia 5 is best release ever!
@Eddie > “So I guess for now systemd can’t be THAT bad because I don’t see anyone from the open souce community offering an alternative.”
But there ARE alternatives. They just don’t get mentioned by the pro-systemd propaganda drifting around the net.
For init systems there is, of course, sysvinit.
OpenRC
nosh
finit
runit
perp
For embedded systems with OpenWRT there’s procd
There’s also eudev: A fork of systemd designed to free udev from dependence on any particular init system.
Finally there’s uselessd: “Basically, it’s systemd with the superfluous stuff cut out, a (relatively) coherent idea of what it wants to be, support for non-glibc platforms and an approach that aims to minimize complicated design.”
So open source developers ARE providing alternatives. If [insert your favorite distro name here] isn’t carrying them in its repositories, that’s something to think about.
I origianlly had links to all those projects in my comment, but it kept getting deleted as spam. 😛