The Magic is Born -> Mageia 1 Released
The inaugural release of the new Mandriva-fork, Mageia, made its debut today. In just nine short months this new distribution sprang up from a single idea to come to fruition. This admirable feat shows the strong commitment and abilities of the founders and developers. Thanks to them today we, the Linux community, have another distribution from which to choose. Yippee.
Mageia was born out of the uncertainty of Mandriva's future. Mandriva S.A. was having financial problems yet again and many worried this was actually the end this time. Well, Mandriva scraped up some investors and was saved, but Mageia was already dancing through Anne Nicolas' head. Despite Mandriva's reprieve, she and several ex-employees of and contributors to Mandriva got together and gave birth to Mageia. A distribution they described as "not dependent on the economic fluctuations and erratic, unexplained strategic moves of the company" (referring to Mandriva S.A.). And today we are the recipient. Mageia 1 has been released.
Mageia 1 is based on Mandriva 2010 and naturally feels very much like Mandriva. They began with the stable Mandriva base in order to create their build systems. From here the true fork will begin to emerge. As such Mageia 1 features KDE 4.6.3, GNOME 2.32.1, Firefox 4.0.1, Linux 2.6.38.7, X.Org X Server 1.10.1, GCC 4.5.2, and loads and loads of other software.
Downloads come in full DVD or desktop-specific Live CDs in 32- and 64-bit architectures. Now, I've had trouble booting the Live images (as in they won't boot for me), but when looking around the forums I gathered I'm the only one. The full DVD works just fine and I performed an upgrade from the last Mageia Release Candidate. That only took like seven or eight minutes and appears to be a complete success. You can upgrade from Mandriva 2010, but if you try to upgrade from Cooker it'll probably fail in one way or another.
Some statistics from the Website are:
* 100+ contributors in 10+ teams
* 180+ generous donors of 11.700+ EUR
* 7.389 source packages
* 2 × 14.226 binary packages
* in 161 languages
Their Website also says, "Mageia is about people - the people who make and the people who use Mageia the Linux distribution." In fact, the installer slideshow says the same thing. They probably say it best with "We're completely community based, with everything that implies."