Tag: Mageia

Many years ago I used to be a Mandriva user and contributor, mostly active in packaging software. I stopped my contributions because I had the feeling the distribution was having more and more trouble keeping up with all new evolutions in the GNU Linux free software world and was loosing ground to other, more innovative distributions. Finally I settled for Debian myself. Even though it is not always the most innovative distribution itself, I liked its open, independent community-based nature.

Now after all this time, I was curious to see how my former favourite distribution had evolved. Mandriva was forked by former Mandriva employees and contributors, and so Mageia was born. Mageia is currently developing version 4 of its distribution and released beta 2 two weeks ago, on 13 December 2013. I decided to try out this version.
Continue reading “Going back to my roots: testing Mageia 4 beta”

In spite of the fact that Mandriva has decided on its shareholder’s meeting to publish new release 2011 at the end of the first half of 2011 and to improve its communication towards the community, one can safely say that both the distribution and the company do not have any realistic future anymore. A bunch of ex-employees (most of them fired when Edge-IT was liquidated) and a big part of the community, have decided to fork the distribution under the new name Mageia. Now with only a handful of developers left and with most of the community contributors moved to Mageia, I do not see how new Mandriva releases will happen anymore in the future. Let’s hope that the Mageia community manages to take over what is left from Mandriva and that it can become a nice distribution bringing Linux to the masses.