Is Mageia a good fit for me? a multi-distro user

[jtwdyp]

I've been addicted to Linux for years. But I've never found any distro that I could "love" for all my needs.

In the early days there were so many things I wasn't good enough to get working. So I tried one distro after another looking for one that worked for me. Then I discovered that there were package management systems that could usually keep me out of "dependency {expletive deleted}" Just as long as I wasn't tempted by software that couldn't be had in the repos.

But every now and then there was something that didn't work with my hardware. Then I found out that I could install more than one Linux on the same drive with the win98 I didn't want to fall back on. Next thing you know I've got 4 Linux distros plus a rarely used vista on my laptop. And 5 distros plus a seldom booted xp on my desktop system.

I used to be a kde user until I met kde4. Then I ran into the arms of enlightenment. I tend to like to also install xfce as a back-up gui for whenever I do something stupid to E...

I always find a way to boot to console and use startx when I want the gui to start. I use mc as my file manager. I use alpine as my mail client. add vim and a few kde tools I'm still addicted to (like konsole, yakuake and skanlite) e15 and/or e17 plus xfce with firefox & opera and something like libreoffice plus lyx & speedcrunch. Let me assign ownership of my personal data partitions to my non-root user account in /etc/udev/rules.d Let me forbid any and all auto-mounting of anything ever except as defined in /etc/fstab (where I even define custom mountpoints for my approved flash drives via lines like

Code: Select all

/dev/disk/by-id/usb-SanDisk_Cruzer_Switch_20054255720EF1C00DE4-0:0-part1        /drv-zip/usbZipShuttle/green  auto user,noauto     0       0

If I want to mount one that isn't set up that way I'll use a root shell...

add a few graphic and multi-media tools and maybe a game or two, stir well, and I'm happy...

I'm thinking of giving Mageia a try on my desktop because after an equo-upgrade broke my Sabayon installation I'm finding that the installer on their current release doesn't like my desktop. I think it's something to do with the built in (Nvidia GeForce 6150 LE) graphics card which doesn't work well with nouveau... So I think I'm going to have a 28 gig partition available to try out a replacement...

And I like the idea that there seems to be a method to use the package manager to upgrade from one release to the next without having to recreate my user environment from scratch...

So what are the odds that Mageia will work well enough for me (even with my unusual ways) to make me want to add it to my laptop to???

[marja]

Hi jtwdyp,

Why don't you just try a LiveCD or LiveDVD first to get an impression?

If you like what you see, then install Mageia + the additional software you mentioned

[jtwdyp]

mainly because with a live cd I need to change virtually every single {desktop} keyboard shortcut and then with most live cd's I even need to install mc . all before I can stand to use it... This wouldn't be so bad if those configurations would transfer to the installed system. I'm very dependant on my keyboard shortcuts.
And getting them configured is a real pain...

[marja]

Well, another option is installing Mageia on a USB-key.

However, all people I met who said something similar to

I've been addicted to Linux for years. But I've never found any distro that I could "love" for all my needs.

kept going from distro to distro.

Did you ever consider helping to fix the things that don't work well in your current distros? If not: please consider this. There are several things you can do:

File a bug report or, if it already exists, add a comment that it is valid for you, too
Help pinpoint the real issue (is it the software itself, a library it needs, does it not occur in another DE, ....?)
Help search for a fix (sometimes another distro or upstream has one)
Help test possible fixes

It is really rewarding if an issue got fixed, and you've helped with it

Around September last year in Cauldron on two of my machines, after an Xorg server update, the video driver segfaulted when starting it. I filed a bug report and tried all I could to get a good backtrace. Found other distros had the same problem, found months later that there was a workaround, which was then imported into Mageia so that the driver worked again. Then a developer here found a real fix in another distro and asked me to test it. I found it to work very well, and then the fix was imported (which wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been a bug report). Every time I use one of those machines and watch a movie on it, I feel a great happiness that I contributed to us finding a good solution that was included when Mageia 3 was released .

[jtwdyp]

Well, another option is installing Mageia on a USB-key.

Yeah maybe so. But I don't see the advantage. I mean if I really wanted to try a new distro, and didn't want to make room on the hard drive, I might go there. But as long as I have an available partition with enough room on it... Well I'd just as soon install to that...

However, all people I met who said something similar to

I've been addicted to Linux for years. But I've never found any distro that I could "love" for all my needs.

kept going from distro to distro.

Maybe so. But once I bother to get one configured to run the way I like, it takes a lot of aggravation to get me to give up on it. Of course, the things that aggravate me might be non-issues for you etc...

Did you ever consider helping to fix the things that don't work well in your current distros? If not: please consider this. There are several things you can do:

File a bug report or, if it already exists, add a comment that it is valid for you, too
Help pinpoint the real issue (is it the software itself, a library it needs, does it not occur in another DE, ....?)
Help search for a fix (sometimes another distro or upstream has one)
Help test possible fixes

It is really rewarding if an issue got fixed, and you've helped with it

Yes and no... My personal strengths and weaknesses are such that I have difficulty understanding most of what I've found on bug tracker/bugzilla databases. But I have on occasion {when a problem doesn't seem to stem from my non-standard configuration choices.} filed bug reports.

Who knows, maybe Mageia will be the distro to inspire me to give back a little more...

[Xhermin]

The advantage of doing it as a usb key is that you can "remaster" it to suit your quirks, then install it from there.

I distro-hop a fair amount as well, usually within KDE. I liked the look of previous Sabayon releases (and I miss hearing "Rock & Roll Hall of Fame" on bootup!), but after working with Debian (and derived) distros with Synaptic, their package/repo/install system turned me off. I never warmed up to OpenSuSE. Base-level distros like Debian and Mandriva are nice, but I tend to like them better after someone else has applied a bit of polish.

SimplyMEPIS, PCLinuxOS, and Mageia are my favorites, with occasional forays into LinuxMint (MATE version).

Although, I must say, Ubuntu is almost beginning to look good, as of 12.04. Shoot me now.

[jtwdyp]

The advantage of doing it as a usb key is that you can "remaster" it to suit your quirks, then install it from there.

Hmmmm I'm not used to doing that. I only ever managed to put a linux installation medium on usb once... When I recently installed Mageia on my desktop in fact. I had been in the middle of burning the iso, when my desktops burner died... So after some stumbling around I discovered that I could install something called unetbootin from the repos of my antiX installation. I used that make a bootable usb key with the mageia iso...

But it sounds like your saying that I could routinely install any distro to usb, customize it, And then install the customized version from the usb key? Would that include setting up my user accounts once {on the usb key} and then installing to multiple machines with my users all preconfigured??

Could you point me at an easy to follow how-to?????

[doktor5000]

In short: Nope, you can't do that with Mageia. Other distros include remastering tools, meaning that you can take a live system,
remaster this one (adding packages, configuring stuff and so on) and then get another installable live system from that.

What you can currently do, is get a live Mageia ISO image, extract the huge squashfs/overlayfs file, mount it, chroot to it and customize
as you like, as with any running system. Then get out the chroot, and compress that system again and put it back into the ISO image.

Apart from that, there's still https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Auto_inst