Mageia 5 & UEFI feedback collection thread

[nw1456]

edit doktor5000: merged similar pure Mageia 5 feedback threads into this one, as it was the first

Hi Guys
Some feedback on my install.

I have an almost new Toshiba with win 8.1. Downloaded 5 Final yesterday, made 300gb free space from the Win partition. Turned off Secure boot and fast start, DVD in and reboot. Install was very straight forward and pretty slick. Finished installing, removed media and rebooted. I was able to boot into both Mageia 5 and Win 8.1 through Grub 2.

The support for UEFI works fantastic, absolutely outstanding work by all the team. I can't think of a single thing that went wrong!

Just one thing, when can we expect 6 ? I know, some people are never satisfied!

Cheers

[filip]

Thanks for your report nw1456. Good to know.

Just one thing, when can we expect 6 ? I know, some people are never satisfied!

If you can pop in somewhere it might be sooner .

[msdobrescu]

Hi, I have a custom built NAS, using Mageia, based on Intel Atom + nVidia Ion.
It had Mageia since upgradibg it from Mandriva.
I have upgraded it from version to version.
After starting the upgrade I have had even a power down issue, but I have restarted the upgrade after, again.
It was done by using the upgrade applet, live from the Internet directly, without a DVD, CD or USB flash drive.
It took very long (12 hours, I guess it is due to the power of Atom, my Internet connection being of 1GB).
In the end, I must say it was the best upgrade ever, no much packages left behind (a few tens were not uninstalled, but I did it manually).
Absolutely no error at all, all the settings and services were there with no exception.
I use KDE, for occasional use. It became much faster now!
So, THANK YOU! Another great release is done!

One question though: what is the best tool for remote access (including remote access to KDE), with support for Windows too, to use?

Regards.

[ca-on-adam]

Hello all,

I just wanted to let everyone know how excited I am about the release of Mageia 5! I will be doing upgrades from M4, new installs on other computers, and just all-around testing and tinkering with it.

I have limited capability to contribute right now (I am supposed to be active in the QA team), but I figure the least I can do is seed the torrents to help others get Mageia 5. So I've got my torrent client up to full throttle!

I'll be back with results from my upgrades and new installs.

[doktor5000]

One question though: what is the best tool for remote access (including remote access to KDE), with support for Windows too, to use?

There is no best tool. For ease of use, I'd say teamviewer, as everything else needs some configuration. Check viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9809 for other suggestions.

[DiBosco]

I have to say, the boot time of Mageia 5 is stunningly fast. I've been using it on my main desktop for a couple of days full-on and apart from a hiccough with momentarily losing KDE it seems fabulous. Great work, thanks so much to the amazing team. Looking forward to trying a UEFI install, will be interested to see how that works.

[jkerr82508]

I've just completed switching one of my systems to UEFI. Once I worked out how to get legacy boot fully disabled (the available documentation from HP was a bit sketchy), booting from the boot-nonfree.iso on a usb stick and subsequent net-install went flawlessly.

Jim

[msdobrescu]

Thanks, I'll use x2go.

[doktor5000]

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [DONE], thanks

[kernow]

Just like to say congrats to the Mageia team on version 5. Been using Mageia/Mandriva/Mandrake for ever and I have always had problems upgrading, hardware not recognized or more often than not display problems with xorg, nvidia etc. But this time I upgraded a Desktop and a Laptop from Mageia 4 > 5 and everything went pefectly, so congrats again and well done!

[doktor5000]

Just wanted to say that Mageia 5 is outstanding so far! Using LXQT for DE as a lightweight KDE. Used to be long time Xfce user, but LXQT is very nice!

Looking forward to helping with wikis, forum etc...

Thank You Mageia team!

[doktor5000]

Using LXQT for DE as a lightweight KDE. Used to be long time Xfce user, but LXQT is very nice!

Hi there,

if you have any suggestions or feedback feel free to check the LXQt thread: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=7604
Some parts are already on my todo list, but the major parts it will only come with lxqt 1.0 - https://wiki.mageia.org/en/User:Doktor5000#TODO

[ca-on-adam]

Wow!!! I have been seeding the torrents for about 4 weeks, and I must say, Mageia 5 is popular! Here is a summary of my torrent uploads since 24-June:

Mageia-5-x86_64-DVD: 100.4 GB
Mageia-5-i586-DVD: 56.51 GB
Mageia-5-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD: 28.83GB
Mageia-5-LiveDVD-KDE4-i586-DVD: 16.94 GB
Mageia-5-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD: 14.09 GB
Mageia-5-LiveDVD-GNOME-i586-DVD: 7.16 GB
Mageia-5-dual-DVD: 4.33 GB
Mageia-5-LiveCD-KDE4-en-CD: 2.9 GB
Mageia-5-LiveCD-GNOME-en-CD: 1.81 GB

TOTAL: 232.97 GB

Geez, it's a good thing I have unlimited Internet! And I'm just one of the many seeders out there.

[doktor5000]

I just thought I'd post a brief note stating that I rolled forward from Mageia 4 to Mageia 5. The move was not totally incident-free, though the incidents were probably peculiar to my installation.

All my hard drive partitions are encrypted, except for / which is not encrypted because that is just too difficult. Because / is not encrypted, /var and /tmp are symlinked to other locations on encrypted volumes. Specifically (and significantly) /var->/mnt/sdd5/var .

After upgrading online using urpmi, my graphical desktop (and a whole bunch of services) failed to start. It took me a little while to find the problem, but it turned out to be that /var/run is a symlink, as is /var/lock.

Specifically, the symlinks were: /var/run->../run and /var/lock->../run/lock .

This seemed to be OK in Mageia 4, but broke in Mageia 5. I changed them to /var/run->/run and /var/lock->/run/lock and all was well.

My other issue was one that frequently crops up on an upgrade. I had to patch some of the Vmware Workstation source code before it would compile with kernel 3.19.

I run a large and complicated environment. My workstation hosts many virtual machines. I frequently use it as a router to help me with testing of various things. It often is a webserver...same reason. I work on a lot of different things, and use the machine for a lot of different purposes. So upgrades are always a stressful time; in the past, I have had upgrades break things badly enough that it took days to sort out.

This upgrade appears to be done, with not a lot of work on my part. I have not tested everything yet, but I know that all the most important things are working. It took several hours, but most of that was because 3800 packages were updated, and all had to be downloaded.

I do know that pithos is broken again; I did have it working in M4, but it is kind of problematic anyway.

So, I have to say that the Mageia team has done an excellent job here.

[jiml8]

...and as a follow-up, I downloaded the latest pithos (1.1.1), installed it, and it worked out of the box.

[doktor5000]

Hi All,

This time Mageia 4 to Mageia 5 upgrade using a DVD was flawless.

Ofcourse I remebered to uninstall Adobereader.

And disabled extra repositories - tainted , etc.

Cheers

[varun_saa]

I forgot to mention the time. it took about

1 hour and 30 minutes.

[isadora]

Congratulations varun_saa

[waferhead]

Tried booting Mageia 5 on a Microcenter Winbook TW100, nice little bay trail quad core atom rig 2gb memory, 32gb emmc disc, 64gb sdcard and full size usb3 port.

Like many (most?)of the extremely common bay trail /atom tablets and laptops, cpu is 64bit, but the efi BIOS is inexplicably 32 bit.

The usual work around is to install a version of the file bootia32.efi in /efi/boot (on the installer USB or CD image) that works with Linux.
(Works with 64 bit ISOs for Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora etc, seems no one makes an efi 32bit distro)

It will boot with Mageia5 but only as far as bringing up the grub> prompt.
(No other modifications were made to the Mageia 5 64 bit image)

Any suggestions as to a good place to start troubleshooting?
Does it perhaps need a 32bit version of grub-efi?

It runs Ubuntu great, but I would very much prefer to have decent system management tools and a well integrated KDE setup.

[doktor5000]

If you want to get some acutal answers for this issue better open a separate thread. But quoting Matthew Garrets article "Don't ship 32-bit UEFI firmware on x86"

Things get irritatingly more complicated due to a quirk of UEFI. UEFI is based on executing code in native mode. That means that 32-bit UEFI systems can't execute 64-bit code in firmware, even if the CPU is capable of it. A 64-bit OS can only boot on 32-bit UEFI if it has very ugly compatibility hacks, including having to rewrite structures and register state every time it makes a UEFI call.
[...]
So, if you're building an x86 hardware platform, don't ship with 32-bit UEFI. If you're stuck with a 32-bit CPU then just ship BIOS. If you have a 64-bit CPU then ship a 64-bit UEFI. If you ship with 32-bit UEFI, no significant existing Linux distribution will support you, and you'll face an uphill battle to convince them to do so.

32-bit UEFI. Just say what on earth were you thinking, please, no, can't you find a solution that doesn't involve me getting tetanus jabs.

You could maybe ask Adam Williamson how he does it for Fedlet ( https://www.happyassassin.net/category/fedlet/ )

[dedanna1029]

Hi, I'm having some issues with UEFI on a Lenovo Z70-80 laptop with 8 gigs RAM, 2.4-GHz processor.
If I don't switch to Legacy mode for Mageia 5, then UEFI blocks Mageia, and sees the Windows bootloader as corrupted. If I switch to UEFI, I can get into Windows just fine but can't get into Mageia 5. I had resized the Windows 8.1 drive for Mageia 5, allotted 300 GBs for it. Could not get into Windows using grub; it would see the bootloader as corrupted as well when I tried. The UEFI on this thing does not like Legacy mode at all.
I don't have Mageia 5 installed atm, but I am using the live KDE DVD.
It's a bit disconcerting, UEFI is, as all this switching back and forth in the BIOS to get into whichever OS can't be good for the computer in general. A few niggles to work out with Mageia 5, and I won't have to worry about it any more... I can install it again as I had previously.

[elviejito]

I'm running into this weird problem -> I bought a new HP 64bit computer a few months ago, wiped the hard drive (with Windows 10 on it) a week or so ago and installed Mageia 5. Now when I power on the computer, Mageia stalls after the 6-second splash page.
But if, at power on, I call up the startup menu and then press "Enter" to continue, Mageia loads.
Mageia is fully updated, including Grub2
There's probably a way to fix this so I don't have to go through that extra step on power on and can just smoothly load Mageia.
Any help would be appreciated.

[doktor5000]

There's probably a way to fix this so I don't have to go through that extra step on power on and can just smoothly load Mageia.
Any help would be appreciated.

As written previously, this is intended to be a feedback thread ...

If you want to get some actual answers for this issue better open a separate thread.

[waferhead]

Finally bit the bullet and upgraded my rock stable Mageia 4 installation to Mageia 5.
This is my 'main" box, mythtv backend w/tuners etc, 3 monitors driven by a 2GB ATI 6950
2 raid arrays: /home is on a 1tb raid1, 1gb, /video (mythtv recordings etc) on a 2tb raid0.

After the regular installers choked, I tried an online update via urpmi, which was ~fast but failed installing the new kernel, fortunately the mga4 ones still worked. (digging revealed grub installation was failing with RAID related errors)

On the upgraded MGA5 or from Live DVD, the arrays are apparently no longer started automatically on boot?
(this setup has worked before Mageia existed on Mandriva, then MGA1/2/3/4 with no issues.)

If I run "''dmraid -ay" it finds everything, then "mount -av" mounts everything fine.
THEN I can log into X11 per usual.

Live DVD installer or mccs disk manager both died after popping up a window until "dmraid -ay" was done.
(did not want a clean install from Live DVD as i wanted to save 30 minutes setting up mysql and mythtv, which worked otherwise, I typically do a clean install of OS)

See viewtopic.php?f=8&t=10326 for thread, by request

[isadora]

Waferhead, thanks for your input.
However, i would advise, opening a separate topic for your issues concerning dmraid.