Magiea 5 Coming Along and Document Freedom
A post to the Mageia Linux development mailing-list indicates Mageia 5 may be shaping up nicely. Over on The Document Foundation Blog, Italo Vignoli updates the public on the progress of the the Document Liberation project. Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 was released today in two varieties and Kevin Fenzi tries to clear up Fedora's Yum/DNF confusion.
Mageia 5 has been delayed before due to various technical reasons, but today Rémi Verschelde hinted that release may not be that far off. In his post to the Mageia Linux development list Verschelde said, "We only have 10 release blockers left" and some of them may already have a fix committed. There are some (re)boot issues and an annoying GRUB2 bug sound like they're under control, but one "nasty bug" shivers my timbers. Bug 15253 describes display corruption for 64-bit machines except at 15bpp and Verschelde said the developers "are clueless about it." He added they may have to make do with an errata. But the bug Verschelde considers "The big blocker" concerns upgrades from Mageia 4 to Mageia 5 "when adding online media to DVD -195 transactions failed." He wrote of that, "It looks like there is a kind of dependency loop that breaks the logic that should install packages with strict requires in the same transaction."
Beta 3 ran about 10 days behind its scheduled release date of February 3 and we're still waiting for a release candidate. Infrastructure issues delayed development and then later an upgrade to newer RPM caused building issues (if memory servers). A RC was previously scheduled for March 7 and Final was estimated around the beginning of April. As it stands now, a RC may not be far away.
The Document Foundation today celebrated the one year anniversary of the Document Liberation project. The Document Liberation project was created "to host the different libraries handling proprietary and legacy document formats within LibreOffice," in a single repository "in order to simplify the integration." Italo Vignoli said the project created a framework "which contains all the document interfaces and helper types, in order to simplify the dependency chain." They've added libraries for several well known proprietary applications in 2014. Dave Tardon explained these developments in more detail and then said, "There are some interesting developments coming this year" too.
Clement Lefebvre today announced the release of Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 in MATE and Cinnamon variations. These images are for new installs, Clem said they're working on the upgrade. There are a few known problems listed, so check that if you're planning a new install.
Kevin Fenzi today posted that he would like to clear up some of the confusion surrounding Yum, DNF, and dnf-yum in upcoming Fedora 22. He said, 'It's somewhat of a middle ground between "yum is gone right now, deal with it" and "you can keep using yum forever".' He explained DNF is default but Yum will be installed if needed by something. If a user tries to use Yum, they will be instructed to use DNF. There are cases when a user might still use Yum, but they'd prefer you didn't. He's hoping this helps when users start reading all those howtos with yum install whatever.