Mageia n00b Cauldron Impression

[pyrrhicvictory]

Greetings,

First time fully using Mageia, and thus far I'm impressed with this release. Thought I'd toss out a few bits here.

Install was quick and easy on the second go-around. Though I found it strange that there was no prompting to change the default hostname.

I say second go-around because the first install attempt failed. The installer offered to download updates during the install process, but it totally choked when it go to that point. It connected to my wi-fi perfectly, but it failed to download a package (apologies, I don't recall which), and the install process halted.

The second time I stuck to just the DVD until after a reboot, and it's been good since. (I'll agree with others that the system should not look to the DVD for updates post-install, though I don' think that's in debate.)

As an aside, I'm not at all familiar with rpms. I've used Debian (and derivatives) and Arch (and derivatives), but the I'm finding installing and updating on Mageia quite snappy.

Things That Are Not Working Particularly Well:

The MATE/Compiz thing doesn't seem to allow GTK theming for the windows. I know there's the Mate Tweak tool that fixed issues on other distros, but I haven't come across it yet in the repos or for manual download.

Both Awesome(WM) and i3 seem to ignore the config files in /home. I haven't figured out what's gone wrong there yet. I plan on trying to move the config files that came with the install and seeing what happens there.

Firejail launches apps as "Superuser". Haven't figured that out yet, either. I checked the profiles and haven't noticed anything different from other distros.

Not sure if the above issues have to do with Mageia, the fact I'm running Cauldron, or something I'm goofing up.

One (super!) tiny niggling issue I have with the graphical installer (as I have to learn how to use urpmi still): When you launch it, a dialogue box appears above announcing that it is finding installed packages, then available packages. Then the dialogue box disappears. But you still have to wait, it's not done. (The graphical installer is the only slow thing I've come across in the system) You have to wait, and this time there's a little bit of text in the lower left-hand corner saying to please wait as it lists the applications. Of course, at this point I have already attempted to type something and realize I have to wait. My suggestion is to include the last (listing) portion in the dialogue box, as opposed to the way it is now. That way, a user will really know if the thing is ready to work or not, and it will feel a bit more polished.

I do have to mention I love the logo. Great work, whomever you are. Also, the initial install looks really good.

I'll end here by saying that I am really pleased thus far, despite everything not working exactly as I'd wish, and I am thrilled with the successes this distro and team have achieved.

[wintpe]

the packaging systems in mageia, ie rpm, urpm* owes its heritage to redhat and mandrake/mandriva

and as a result mageia is in line with the other group of distros that fall under the redhat/fedora derived distros.

M* (as in mandrake/mandriva/mageia) created urpm* which is a play on the rpm command line.

on a redhat system yum is used as the network/repo wrapper for rpm, and in those systems you would use

yum install, yum remove, yum list etc.

but M* descided to take the rpm command , ie rpm -ivh, rpm -e , rpm -qal etc and wrapp it with its own network repo wrapper.

thus the commands urpmi urpme urpmq etc were created.

i for install, e for remove and q for query.

otherwise for packages that are local rpm -ivh packagename.rpm can be used.

this analogy is in line with the relationship between dpkg and apt

regards peter

[jkerr82508]

This page gives a more verbose description of the urpm* commands.
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/URPMI
With the exception of urpmq and urpmf those commands must be run as the superuser (AKA root). To become the superuser, in a terminal enter:

Code: Select all

su - root

GUI applications that require root privileges (such as Mageia Control Centre) will ask you to enter the root password when you launch them.

It is possible to set-up sudo on Mageia, but it is not available in a default installation.

Jim

[pyrrhicvictory]

wintpe: Thanks for the explanation! I started looking through urpm* commands and the suffix thing seemed strange and unintuitive. Makes much more sense now, especially with the history behind it. Fascinating, I'll have to poke around more to satisfy this new curiosity.

jkerr82508: Thanks for the link! Much better than the one I stumbled upon.

I prefer a sudo-less system, actually. I did notice sudo did come pre-installed, but, as you say, my user is not in the "sudoers file".

I did happen across the part of MCC where you can set the permissions for different activities in a fine-grained manner. For instance, allowing a user to update but not install new software, something like that. Interesting.

Thanks again!

[filip]

Code: Select all

su - root

You can even shorten that to:

Code: Select all

su -