First impression of beta 1: every issue could get resolved

[bertaerts]

Installation happened without issues.

Then I wanted my wireless network connection. As the iwlwifi-3945-ucode-15.32.2.9-2.mga1.noarch.rpm is in the non-free repo, it is not on the "free" x86_64 DVD, so I had to connect my notebook to a wired network to install the repo's and then the wireless setup could download the needed ucode. After that wireless was working just fine.

I checked if something could be updated from the repo's and the one day old "beta 1" DVD with KDE 4.6.1 could already be updated to version 4.6.2. Almost 400 modules got updated.

I wanted to listen to music with Amarok. I had two issues. First of all mp3's could not be played. I had to install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-0.10.21-2.mga1.x86_64.rpm and gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-0.10.16-3.mga1.x86_64.rpm. Why are they not installed by default? Secondly I did not see the context panel in the middle of Amarok with e.g. the lyrics or wikipedia info. It took me quite some time to find out that I had to unlock the interface and drag the right panel to the left to let the context panel be born...

I went to the Mageia control center in the graphical server setup to change it and get the message that there are proprietary drivers for my graphics card. Being used to Mandriva powerpack, this step was new to me. On top of the nVIDIA modules, also gcc still had to be installed to my big surprise, together with kernel devel. I got the request to log out of the KDE graphical user interface. But I did not get the graphical interface to login again, only a command line login. So I logged in, became root and did a "shutdown -h now". After system restart, the nVIDIA splash screen and nVIDIA control panel revealed that I had indeed the proprietary drivers.

I installed VLC and wanted to watch DVB-T television with my Terratec Cinergy T USB XXS stick. As it did not work, I went to hardware in the Mageia control center and was surprised that suddenly lots of modules were installed, very often i586 ones on my x86_64 system... The DVB-T stick was recognised. "lsmod" learned that the needed modules were active, but "dmesg" pointed out that the firmware was not found, so I installed kernel-firmware-20110314-2.mga1.noarch.rpm, copied the file with channel config from Mandriva 2010.2 and yes my "television" worked!

The last thing I tried yesterday evening was trying out text-to-speech. I installed festival and espeak and then activated jovie. But I could not add a synthesizer in the GUI of jovie. I once created a bug report for Mandriva 2010.1 about this in an older edition of KDE. But apparantly in KDE 4.6.2 this is still not usable.

To be continued...

[wobo]

I went to the Mageia control center in the graphical server setup to change it and get the message that there are proprietary drivers for my graphics card. Being used to Mandriva powerpack, this step was new to me. On top of the nVIDIA modules, also gcc still had to be installed to my big surprise, together with kernel devel. I got the request to log out of the KDE graphical user interface. But I did not get the graphical interface to login again, only a command line login. So I logged in, became root and did a "shutdown -h now". After system restart, the nVIDIA splash screen and nVIDIA control panel revealed that I had indeed the proprietary drivers.

Explanation what happened:
After downloading the proprietary driver the module matching your kernel has to be built. Obviously you did not install the "Development" package group which is not marked for a standard installation, so some more packages had to be installed (like gcc). The driver was written in the xorg configuration but the module was not built by then, presenting you with a text screen after logging out/in. So you had to restart the system. During system start the module was built, resulting in the nvidia splash and working GUI.

[caieng]

Installation happened without issues.

Greetings....

Sorry to provide a very different summary: COMPLETE FAILURE....

a. Download smooth, torrent worked well, cd copied, no problem.

b. computer tested: homemade: motherboard ASROCK 4coredualsata; cpu: celeron E3400; video: Matrox G450, memory 2 GB/dual channel.

c. Installation issues: (two)

1/2: installer demands 2 character password. This is a killer for me. I will not (generally--made an exception here, out of deep respect for ancient Mandrake) bother to continue with a distro that insists on multiple characters for a password. Forget it. Fix it, or lose me as a potential user.

2/2: so I complied with the demand to employ two characters for a password, despite planning autologin, but, I never reached the garden of eden. At login, on reboot, the software illustrated my login name with an icon, I clicked, and it then asked for my password. I inserted the two characters, hit return, and the screen returned, as if I had not entered anything. I rebooted, and tried it again. Same result.....

This is a fatal error, not just a whimsical, idiosyncratic notion from an ancient mariner....

caieng

[wobo]

1/2: installer demands 2 character password. This is a killer for me. I will not (generally--made an exception here, out of deep respect for ancient Mandrake) bother to continue with a distro that insists on multiple characters for a password. Forget it. Fix it, or lose me as a potential user.

I guess you mean the user password - well, there is a reason for passwords being longer than one of 26 characters. But that's your decision (although I never heard anybody complaining about this).
You can have autologin, set it in the summary of the installer.

2/2: so I complied with the demand to employ two characters for a password, despite planning autologin, but, I never reached the garden of eden. At login, on reboot, the software illustrated my login name with an icon, I clicked, and it then asked for my password. I inserted the two characters, hit return, and the screen returned, as if I had not entered anything. I rebooted, and tried it again. Same result.....

This may be a problem of the display manager - what desktop environment are you using, which display manager?

[caieng]

This may be a problem of the display manager - what desktop environment are you using, which display manager?

Hi wobo,
Um, well, I am using the default, whatever that is....I think it is supposed to be xfce, but I am not certain....

I guess you mean the user password - well, there is a reason for passwords being longer than one of 26 characters.

Thanks, wobo, umm, well, yes, and no. That is, normally, with XP, I don't have any passwords, and it has worked well for me, for a decade.....But, with Linux, I can tolerate a single character password for the supervisor mode.

For the user mode, i.e. the login mode, I don't use a password. no need. If the distro requires the user to enter more than one character for either user name or password, or supervisor password, I call it quits, and move on to a distro that is more flexible.....

You can have autologin, set it in the summary of the installer.

Thanks, I must have missed that step, strange, because I was looking for it....That's exactly what I would have put BEFORE asking the user to enter n digits for name/password.....An installer needs to be a little bit sharper, than this.....

Now that I think about it, there was one other peculiarity of the installation. I supposed, at the time, that it was simply a glitch, or an oversight, but, maybe not: The date shown, during installation, was March 2011, not April 2011, even though I downloaded the distro from the official mageia web site, this morning.....

Thanks again for your reply, much appreciated.....

[wobo]

Thanks, wobo, umm, well, yes, and no. That is, normally, with XP, I don't have any passwords, and it has worked well for me, for a decade.....But, with Linux, I can tolerate a single character password for the supervisor mode.
For the user mode, i.e. the login mode, I don't use a password. no need. If the distro requires the user to enter more than one character for either user name or password, or supervisor password, I call it quits, and move on to a distro that is more flexible.....

I think you can have no password at all (leave the field empty). But I'd strongly recommend having at least a good password (6 digits) for root. You don't need it too often anyway, only when working as root (or superuser).

The date shown, during installation, was March 2011, not April 2011, even though I downloaded the distro from the official mageia web site, this morning.....

The date is the creation date of that part of the distribution (the installer or kernel or whatever), that's all.

[bertaerts]

To be continued... here it is

I installed the 64 bit flash player from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashpl ... quare.html
Unpacked the file libflashplayer.so and put it in /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/
But was unhappy as sound from Firefox 4 was not coming together with Amarok.
I checked my Mandriva 2010.2 x86_64 configuration and finally installed in Mageia lib64alsa-plugins-pulseaudio-1.0.24-1.mga1 and it worked: in Pulse Audio Volume Control "ALSA plugin [plugin-container]" appeared like in 2010.2 and sound was simultaneous from Firefox and Amarok.

But I am still missing quite some rpm's: beid for Belgian Identity card reader, NtEd for musical notation, Rosegarden for music, aMule from PLF, LottaNZB, HellaNZB, par2 for binary newsgroups...

I am currently running Energy "nrj" kernel from Mandriva International Backports MIB in 2010.2. But haven't found a real comparison with the stock desktop kernel from Mandriva. What is being used in Mageia?

[masinick]

I did a clean installation of Mageia 1 Beta 1 and that went well. However, before that clean installation, I attempted a distribution upgrade from Mandriva 2011 Beta 1 to Mageia Beta 1. Guess I can't do that, huh? It wouldn't do it at all, though it offered it as a potential upgrade candidate, identifying it as Mandriva 2011 Cooker. It didn't work. Sure would be nice if I could replace the software from Mandriva. I just installed over it instead and that worked fine.

[magnus]

However, before that clean installation, I attempted a distribution upgrade from Mandriva 2011 Beta 1 to Mageia Beta 1. Guess I can't do that, huh?

I think this will be impossible because cooker uses rpm5. Mageia uses rpm.
An upgrade from 2010.1(2) is possible because there is also rpm.

[masinick]

However, before that clean installation, I attempted a distribution upgrade from Mandriva 2011 Beta 1 to Mageia Beta 1. Guess I can't do that, huh?

I think this will be impossible because cooker uses rpm5. Mageia uses rpm.
An upgrade from 2010.1(2) is possible because there is also rpm.

I figured there were some incompatibilities there somewhere. Initially I thought I had a few other issues, but I simply came back the next day, made certain that my repositories were refreshed, then I was able to find and install everything that I was looking for, and not only that, everything worked just right. This test release is looking solid.

[Germ]

Hi Brian!

Good to see you here.

[masinick]

Hi Brian!

Good to see you here.

Hey Germ, did you "defect" along with the others when they were dumped from Mandriva? Man, has Mandriva ever gone downhill with the 2011 release! It is one of the most defect filled test releases I've seen from them, or anyone else, in a long time, but this Mageia is looking good. Guess we can tell where the GOOD developers went, huh?

[Germ]

Hey Germ, did you "defect" along with the others when they were dumped from Mandriva?

No, I'm just helping out here. My humble contribution.

Several people are working on both mageia and mandriva.

[masinick]

Hey Germ, did you "defect" along with the others when they were dumped from Mandriva?

No, I'm just helping out here. My humble contribution.

Several people are working on both mageia and mandriva.

Well, there is hope then for Mandriva, but it has been looking pretty bleak, enough so that I am taking a break from it for a while. The Mageia Cooker is cooking up better tasting "food" right now than the Mandriva Cooker, at least food that I enjoy tasting!