Mageia 5, released on Friday and over a year in the making, is familiar territory to those of us who cut our Linux teeth on Mandriva back in the days when it was called Mandrake. That’s not to say that the distro is old or outdated, far from it, but any Mandrake old-timer will instantly recognize the roots of this distro.
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
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.
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
Yep, it looks like the end of the week is upon us once again, and with it there has been a lot of news in the FOSS realm. What you might have missed, if you weren’t paying attention, is the following:
Happy 13th, Tux Paint: There was reason to break out the candles this week — 13 of ’em — and put them on a cake before saying “Happy Birthday” to Tux Paint. Tux Paint was first released to the wider world on June 16, 2002. Now that it’s a teenager, we can see what fantastic progress the New Breed Software folks have achieved in this time.
Tux Paint turned 13 this week, and also became available for Android. Great going, New Breed Software!FOSS Force — or rather, I — wrote about Tux Paint back in August of last year, and on its birthday back on Tuesday, there was a note on the site that said, and I quote, “We’ve just learned that Tux Paint (based on what will become the 0.9.23 version) has been created for Android, and is available for free in the Google Play Store!”
It ceased to be funny about the third time I read it. “Is this the year of the Linux desktop?”
Uh, yeah it is. Just like it was in 2014, 2013, 2012…It just depends on whose desktop you are talking about.
The topic came up when an old friend, Richard, and I began an email exchange to catch up after a number of years. He’s a senior Linux admin for one of the major New York City hospitals and the topic turned to some things we’ve noted over time. We talked about how Linux isn’t. It isn’t in the public awareness. It isn’t in stores. It isn’t offered by OEMs in any real quantity. It isn’t visible at all. Richard stated that it was probably better that way. Why he said that, I don’t know. I’ll have to bring that up again, but I have a fairly good idea.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
I’ve been kicking an idea around for a while now. I deemed it important enough to keep a notebook, a place where I could jot down my ideas and questions…maybe a profound revelation or two. I’ve collected ideas and thoughts concerning this topic from folks like Jim Zemlin, Dana Blankenhorn and Tom Adelstein. And while some conversations took place a while back, the input is no less valuable.
I’ve spent a good deal of time, as well, kicking this around with my partner-in-ink Larry Cafiero. And some of the things I’ve taken away were not gotten face-to-face: Folks like Steven Vaughan-Nichols and Matt Hartley have discussed it through their preferred media in one way or another.
Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue
Every time we run a story on FOSS Force touching on Canonical’s financial health, such as Larry Cafiero’s notice a week or so ago about Shuttleworth’s musings on a potential IPO, the Ubuntu naysayers come up from their basements to express the opinion that Shuttleworth is finally getting tired of flushing money down the toilet and is getting ready to put a padlock on the door and go home.
Dell labels this on its website as “Inspiron 14 3000 Series Laptop Ubuntu Edition.”That’s not going to happen, because that would be snapping defeat out of the arms of victory. Shuttleworth knows the smell of victory — that’s how he came to be worth $500 million — and Ubuntu finally seems to be primed for success.
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
Mandriva S.A., the French company behind Mandriva, the distribution that long time Linux users will remember as Mandrake, died this week at the age of sixteen. The announcement came in the form of a notice posted by the company earlier this week. The cause of death was financial hemorrhaging.
The distro began life as Mandrake, but was forced to change its name due to a trademark dispute with the Hearst newspaper chain, which owned the rights to the “Mandrake the Magician” comic strip. Mandriva was a combination of the original name and Conectiva, a Brazilian distro the company purchased for $2.3 million in 2005.
Well, so much for an easy week. I was ready to kick back, give Fedora 22 a further test run and pop open a cold one (root beer, of course) while I wrapped up the week with items like Jim Whitehurst’s busy week which included, among other things, an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” a review of Bodhi Linux on about.com, of all places, which I found interesting in a quirky way. And maybe — just maybe — we could all talk about Richard Stallman claiming the OS we all use should be called GNU, oblivious to the fact that this particular train left the station, oh, 20 years ago or thereabout.
Kubuntu’s Jonathan RiddellBut no. Now I have to make popcorn, sit back, and watch this drama unfold.
The $143,000 question: Softpedia reported earlier this week that there’s a unaccounted-for $143,000 in donations to Ubuntu that the Ubuntu Community Council can’t seem to find. While this doesn’t seem to be a new story, if mailing list traffic is any indication, it is an issue that does pique the interest for — what do you call them again? Oh yeah — answers.
To great fanfare, Fedora 22 was released to the wider world yesterday. And to those who awaited it with bated breath, it does not disappoint.
A word to the uninitiated: As many of you already know, in the broadest terms, Fedora is a testbed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Developments in Fedora – and there are many, leading to its cutting-edge reputation (which wrongfully scares some users from using it; more on this later) – sooner or later end up on RHEL for the commercial market.
Since the introduction of Fedora.next — the umbrella program for the roadmap for the distro going forward — the distro comes in three basic flavors: Workstation, Server and Cloud. Workstation is the desktop/laptop version — and workstation version for businesses. Cloud and Server are pretty self-explanatory.
Dammit, Clement Lefebvre, you and your team at Linux Mint have gone and done it. Y’all, and the folks at Xfce too. Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone? I was perfectly fine and dandy with Maya and now you’ve gone and ruined it by coming out with something five times better. Thanks for ruining my Saturday. Thanks a lot.
The Welcome Screen shows up after boot until and contains links to useful information about Linux Mint. Click image to enlarge.Here’s the problem. For the last couple of years or so we’ve been using Mint’s Xfce edition of Maya (that would be version 13 for those who read the box scores) on nearly all of the machines here at FOSS Force. As Maya will be supported until 2017, we had absolutely no plans to make any upgrades until then, as taking time out for the tedious process of upgrading our machines isn’t one of my favorite things to do — and I’m the one who’d be doing the upgrading.
When the folks at Mint released a new LTS Xfce version (Qiana) in June of last year, followed by another LTS (Rebecca) in January, we didn’t much care. We were more than happy with Maya, and following the age old philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” we decided to stay the course and keep using what we had until its sunset year arrived. As far as I was concerned, although approaching obsolescence, Maya was damned near perfect. How much better could the latest and greatest be?
However, you might notice that I write about Maya in the past tense. I confess. I killed her.
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