Happy Birthday Mageia!

Yesterday, September 18, was Mageia's first birthday. It was one year ago that a fork of Mandrake Linux was announced. From the start Mageia decided to take a new tack in distribution development. They synthesized the community and professional models of development in way no other had quite done before and it's paying off. Mageia recently unleashed their inaugural release and received overwhelmingly positive reviews.

Milestones of the new project's first year are listed on the Mageia blog. They include:

● from September to November, we started setting up the infrastructure, gathering people, discussing important bits (basic governance, policies, where to start).

● in January 2011, our factory was ready and we started importing, building packages into it and released our first alpha.

● for the following 6 months, we all worked our asses off to release test images, fix bugs, square the design and have something we could release.

● in June, Mageia 1 was there and largely welcome by the community as a stable, nice, working distribution.

The blog post then links back to some of the key posts of the year announcing the major happenings such as the founders' statement, the logo journey, and the Mageia 1 release announcement.

I've personally followed development of the new distro and continue to be excited Mageia is among our choices. I haven't used Mandriva in years and never expected to use Mageia on my daily workhorse, but that's exactly what's happened. It began as a temporary measure until some KDE fixes trickled down from upstream to Sabayon, but I've become comfortable and settled. Mageia has turned out to be a real contender.

Mageia 1 is still very much Mandriva, but the divergence will be more obvious the next release. Mandriva has gone is a new direction and Mageia developers are working more from their own codebase. It won't be long before the differences between Mageia and Mandriva are as vast as those between Mandriva and Red Hat.

The birthday cake has been eaten and the balloons have settled into the corners by now, but managers, developers, and users celebrated today on IRC and social media. If you missed the celebration, you can still enjoy the Mageia experience by giving the system a test drive.

Happy Birthday Mageia. And many many more.