Mageia 5: Solid, Strong, and Humming Along
Rémi Verschelde on behalf of the Mageia project today announced the release of Mageia 5. This release brings installer improvements including full UEFI support as well as a new administration panel and a move to RPM 4.12. Available in Live, Network, or Classic Installer for 32 or 64 bit computers Mageia 5 also supports upgrading from Mageia 4.
Mageia 5 is here. It seems like a long cycle this time, but Mageia 5 is ready to download and install. This release features much improved UEFI support leading to other installer improvements as well. Btrfs is now a primary filesystem, GRUB2 integration is complete (but still not default), and user ids start at 1000 instead of 500.
RPM has been updated in Mageia 5 to 4.12.0.1 bringing new weaker dependency standards in-line and more compatible with other modern RPM-based distributions. Main difference seems to be old Suggests tag has been replace by new Recommends, as well as complimentary changes in URPMI. Speaking of which, a bug in URPMI was addressed that prevented some updates from completing.
A technical preview of ManaTools in available as well. ManaTools is a wrapper or launcher for configuration and monitoring tools. It's a port of the Mandriva Control Center, originally for openSUSE, with tools such as a journalct log reader, rpm install manager, and firewall manager. I believe it is to be the successor to MCC someday.
Some of the software available includes Linux 3.19, X.Org 1.16.4, GCC 4.9.2, KDE 4.14.3, GNOME 3.14, LibreOffice 4.4.2, Firefox 31.7, and Steam 1.0. Several other popular desktops are available as well, some through the package manager. and KDE 5 is available for testing. The project has an online package browser now that can also do one (or two) click installs. Unlike a lot of modern mainstream distributions, Mageia includes lots of games and platforms, and version 5 brings several new titles as well.
Mageia 5 has a wee bit of an errata. Main concern seems to be UEFI support and a wiki entry has been published and should be consulted. Folks with hybrid graphics should check the errata and there are a few notes on the GNOME Live ISO. When installing, GRUB may take up to 10 minutes to configure with a blank screen, so don't give up. It may still be working. There are a few upgrade and other notes as well, so do give that a read.
Mageia 5 KDE 4.14, Control Center, and Welcome