that Sam guy

Mageia or Mandriva? Review, decision & migration.

Those who follow the Linux news will know that part of the team at Mandriva forked the distribution and started Mageia. At the announcement of the forking in Sep 2010, I was quite worried as to where this would leave me. As I have many servers, desktops, and laptops spread between many friends, family and clients using Mandriva Linux and as such I knew that the path I followed from here would impact many people.

What follows from here is my look at the Mandriva vs. Mageia battle for supremacy on my machines. I’ve been using Mandriva for a long time (since the 8.2 days) and many of the reasons I chose it initially such as ease of use, active community, constant innovation, stability, common server/desktop and amazing configuration tools (DrakX), have remained the same and stopped tempting migrations to Fedora, Ubuntu or Suse. However some things change. Mandriva’s commercial stability has been lacking for a long time, which produced the laying off of a large group of developers – the same developers who decided they’d had enough and created Mageia.

Mageia being a fork of Mandriva has allowed it to keep many of the features as above, and the time has come for a decision: stay with Mandriva, move to Mageia or consider something else entirely.

Please note that I prefer to keep all installations that I manage the same, including servers and desktops, which does remove many other excellent distributions from consideration and also is why Mageia is my first port of call.

Mandriva vs. Mageia – Summary

I have followed the development of both distributions since the announcement with eagerness and interest. Here is my summary of the current status and paths of each:

Mandriva

• Heavy development of new UI tools for easier use (some describe as ‘Mac’ like)
• New investment in the company with Russian money (ROSA Labs)
• Attempting to make a huge jump in lots of new software at once – including RPM5 and systemd
• Delays due to reduced personnel and the huge amount of changes.
• Changeable focus and release schedules
• Upgradeable from previous versions but with some difficulty (due major software changes)

Mageia

• Started with Mandriva 2010.1 but with all packages cleaned and upgraded to the latest versions
• Very, very stable pre-releases (as well as the first release Mageia 1)
• No major changes to the implementation
• Very active new community and good work being done with other distributions
• Allows the community to define the direction, development and core ideas in theory and especially in practice
• Upgradeable from Mandriva 2010.1 officially – see the upgrade guide

Mageia Review

The team at Mageia have taken their time to set up their systems and process for long term success and survivability. These considerations molded what the first release Mageia 1 was going to be like.

The stated focus was:

• Building the Build System
• Start from Mandriva 2010.1, clean, review and rebuild everything
• No major changes – just software updates
• Only include packages as requested

All of this resulted in Mageia 1′s pre-releases (Alpha, Betas, RC) and final release all being exceptionally stable, matching all the features from the best Mandriva release 2010.1 and creating a very clean base to build from. There were no huge failures post release, no obvious beta software included and no controversial or courageous decisions. Just a very solid a capable release.

I won’t rehash other full reviews of Mageia 1. It truly is just a very updated Mandriva 2010.1.

New packages, missing packages

All package in Mageia are cleaned and updated. As such it includes: Linux Kernel 2.6.38, KDE 4.6.3, Gnome 2.32, XFCE 4.8.1, Firefox 4, LibreOffice 3.3.2 and VirtualBox 4.0.6. See the Release Notes for further information.

However if no-one was found to maintain a package, clean and rebuild it, it wasn’t included. As such Mageia 1 ships with much less available software than Mandriva 2010.1, but everything works, most packages people want are there and many more a being added post release.

Repositories and naming

During development of Mageia 1 there was a large (somewhat epic) discussion on how to manage the repositories, names for each and what they should hold. The rolling development release is called Cauldron and works much like Mandriva’s Cooker.

The repositories are:

• Core – free open source packages. The default repository for most packages.
• Non-free – free of charge but not open source packages. E.g. Nvidia and AMD graphics drivers
• Tainted – packages that might infringe on patents in some countries. A la PLF for Mandriva or RPM Fusion for Fedora.

Desktop Look and Feel

Mageia stripped out the icons, wallpaper and theme from Mandriva and started again. The dotted wallpaper is nice and basic in my opinion, but is easily changed to many other nicer ones.

Mageia Control Center (MCC)

I much prefer the new icons in the KDE system tray and Mageia Control Center (MCC) as shown.

Mageia KDE System Tray

However the main point of difference on the desktop, and the only point of controversy is the look of the fonts. That’s right, not the fonts themselves but the way they look. Mageia has decided to enable autohinting which produces cleaner, slimmer fonts. Some say it looks ugly (Bug 175), others like it. Now, I used to be in the “ugly” camp and made sure that my Mandriva installations disabled the PLF version of the fonts which had this effect. However I’ve changed my mind after trying them out for a while and quite like them.

One other change is that KDE seems a lot more stable than previously – including that using the nepomuk file search from within dolphin actually works, in real time and doesn’t drastically slow the machine in the background. Though this is due not so much the Mageia team but to the new KDE version and the great work of the KDE team – so all distributions should also be enjoying the benefits.

Release schedule

Both Mandriva and Mageia are departing from the 6 month release schedule of the Mandriva 2010 series. Mandriva is moving to yearly release whilst after much discussion Mageia is moving to a 9 monthly release cycle. Mageia’s next release is scheduled for 4th April 2012.

The Decision

Mageia continues to do everything I wanted from Mandriva and adds excellent stability, transparency and has shown a great willingness to take greater input and direction from the community. The 9 month release schedule allows for up to date software, but allows enough time to make sure all is stable before release without manic last minute bugs being left.

I have decided to migrate all my Mandriva installations to Mageia and to hopefully participate more as part of the Mageia community.

The migration story so far…

For each machine I’ve moved so far to Mageia I’ve listed the machine specs, previous Mandriva version if any, install type, Mageia edition and a few comments from the install.

Machine 1: Laptop

• Specs: Toshiba Satellite A100 – Intel Core Duo T2300, 1GB RAM, GeForce Go 7300
• Previously: Mandriva 2010.1 32bit Powerpack
• Currently: Mageia 1 32bit KDE via fresh install
  My first install of Mageia was to my own laptop to get a feel of things. I tested the Beta 1 (fresh install), Beta 2 (upgrade),  RC (upgrade) and final (fresh install) and found amazing stability – no crashes or major hiccups at all. It has also certainly also felt quite a bit faster than the previous Mandriva 2010.2. As the Skype packages for Mandriva don’t work anymore, I installed Skype using the notes as shown here.

Machine 2: Desktop

• Specs: AMD Phenom II X4 965BE, 8GB RAM, ATI Radeon 4770
• Previously: Mandriva 2010.2 64bit Powerpack (with many backports)
• Currently: Mageia 1 64bit KDE via upgrade
  Upgraded via the command line with urpmi as per the Mageia upgrade guide. No settings went awry and all worked well. Left over packages from Mandriva that had no Mageia equivalent continue to work correctly. Feels slightly faster.

Machine 3: MythTV HDTV Media Center

• Specs: AMD Athlon X2 6000+, 4G Ram, ATI Radeon X1250 (690G), Dvico FusionHDTV card
• Previously: Mandriva 2010.2 64bit Powerpack
• Currently: Mageia 1 64bit LXDE via upgrade
  Upgraded via the command line using urpmi cleanly but ssh remote connection. TV card continued to work without issues. Still running Mandriva PLF MythTV packages for the moment – I didn’t want to risk that upgrade not working yet. Stopped mythtv services to ensure mysql clean upgrade before restarting for the new kernel.

Machine 4: Laptop

• Specs: Toshiba Portege M800 in Pink – Intel Core 2 Duo P7350, 2GB RAM, Intel Mobile 4 Graphics
• Previously: Mandriva 2010.1 64bit Powerpack
• Currently: Mageia 1 64bit KDE via upgrade
  Most risky upgrade – my wife’s laptop. Upgraded safely with no lost settings or files. Main difference was the font look change as mentioned above. Microphone continues the same habit of not working as seen under Mandriva. Overall a great success!

Machine 5: Production Web and Database Server

• Specs: Intel Xeon 3.0Ghz (P4 based with HT), 2GB Ram, 2x80GB HDD in Raid 1 (mdadm)
• Previously: Mandriva 2009.0/2009.1 Hybrid 64bit
• Currently: Mageia 1 64bit via online upgrade
  This server has been constantly upgraded from Mandriva 2007.1 onwards. As only upgrades from 2010.1 are officially supported I felt this was a bit risky, but worth a try. I allocated enough time to rebuild from scratch if needed, however it was not necessary. To reduce the risk I ran urpmi with the extra –test option to make sure all packages were available for install first. All services came up successfully to my pleasant surprise. I did spend a couple of hours slowly removing leftover packages that had slowly built up over time – including 14 obsolete kernels.

Tagged with: desktop, Linux, Mageia, Mandriva, review, server

Categorised as: Linux, Mageia, Mandriva, Servers