Mageia forum

Remember the old times? It was about five, maybe six years ago. When every other distribution would fail, you could put your Mandriva CD into the slot and it would work out of the box.
Fast forward, it's early 2015, Mageia 4 is out and stable, and I have two computers: A self-built desktop computer with two Radeon graphics cards from 2013 with Crossfire and a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga. Both of them work out of the box with Fedora and OpenSUSE, but I wanted to try out, and maybe switch back to, good old Mandriva/Mageia.
First, I tried Mageia 4.
Desktop: Yay, the setup starts, and everything seems to work, it even ships directly with an FGLRX-driver. I of course select the option to use the proprietary driver. First bummer: I can't establish a wifi-connection, even though the correct driver is available (it's an ath9k chip), and I can enter both the network name and the WPA2-key. It just fails without clear error message besides of "something went wrong". I finish configuration and reboot.
It fails to boot.
It gets stuck somewhere and displays the message that it has been "shut down". Yeah, great. Not even an emergency console.
Thinkpad Yoga: The installer fails to start the X server, and thus an installation is not possible.

Well, fair enough - maybe the drivers on the by now one year old Mageia aren't new enough. Let's try Mageia 5 Beta 3. Yes, I realize it's a beta and it's considered unstable, but what I experienced reminded me of an early alpha.
Thinkpad Yoga: The installer starts - in full HD! But neither the trackpad, nor trackpoint, nor keyboard work. I have to plug in an USB-mouse and an USB-keyboard. The installer completely ignores the region settings and leaves me with the default en_US keyboard setting. Fair enough - I know the layout good enough by now. The installation works, except that it's completely impossible to even start setting up a wifi connection. I create a user and set the user and root passwords, reboot and remove the USB stick.
Without any explanation at all, I'm put into emergency mode. After a few tries I figure it might be because the USB stick isn't plugged in. And - it boots with the installer USB-stick plugged in! I'm on the KDM screen, even the built-in keyboard works now. But Mageia doesn't accept my password at all, neither in KDM nor on the console, both still being en_US. Disappointed, I cancel the attempt to switch the Thinkpad over to Mageia.
Desktop: The installer starts. Even the locale settings work. The installation is annoyingly slow, taking over one hour, hinting that there are USB problems or something related. A wifi connection during the configuration phase still is impossible. After the reboot, the emergency mode is inevitable - as suspected, Mageia has problems with USB.

Goodbye, Mageia. I'll miss you.

Farewell zilti, I won't miss you.

whoa!



@zilti:
i was just to say exactly the contrary.
all works perfectly well.
and am teh noob at comp.

zilti wrote:Remember the old times? It was about five, maybe six years ago. When every other distribution would fail, you could put your Mandriva CD into the slot and it would work out of the box.

I know this is an old topic but... you were actually installing Mandriva every time you were having problems with some other distros? Why? I mean, why were you giving up on Mandriva afterwards, every time? Or was it a live CD/DVD? I don't recall Mandriva having live iso images... I may be wrong though, I've never been a "religious" Mandriva user.

omnio wrote:Or was it a live CD/DVD? I don't recall Mandriva having live iso images... I may be wrong though, I've never been a "religious" Mandriva user.

At least since 2006 they had live images called One, not sure if 2005LE had.

re HW support is an issue

what a load of *********

I have never once had an issue with HW support in mageia/mandriva/mandrake.

yes linux generally is a bit picky with cheap and nasty, economically designed hardware, take soft modems as an example of what I mean, and soft printers

these devices have no onboard processing logic and expect it all to be done in a software daemon, pumping nothing but low level hardware to a very dumb device. Yes they have massive problems with all Unix's, so really poor to pick out one distribution.

For Linux you have to look at apple as an example of how to choose your hardware.

pick hardware that is well known to be supported by linux, not the other way round, ie dont buy a cheap windows PC and expect it to work with Linux, as that method is really hit and miss. Remember the vendors of these PC's only test against windows.

Its the vendor of the PC's responsibility to make sure it works for the platform they are selling it for. Try going to microsoft or apple and complaining that a PC designed for Linux wont work with their OS.


Thats what we do in the infrastructure business, we choose servers that both the Linux distributions, mostly Red Hat and the manufacturer , often, Cisco, HP, IBM, Dell, Supermicro have certified as supported.

regards peter

Just to say that I have Mageia on a very broad range of different hardware, from old Macbook Pro to new hardware with a range of processor types and the hardware recognition is very good.
I think Mageia does not get anywhere near the acknowledgement that it should for the excellent quality that it delivers.

--Tony

What a funny thread. Mageia and hardware support? What?

As far as I am concerned, Mageia is not running the newest Kernel, but it is always quite updated. As regards to "hardware support" in Mageia, it is surely one of the distroes who ships the most firmware, and surely greater than many when it comes to hardware detection. Not all distroes use hardware detection and rather relies on loading all drivers. I know Mageia kernel team also loads "all"(most) drivers as modules and/r inbuilt. I personally think the Mageia Kernel team does a great job. With hardware detection in addition and one of the biggest collections of firmware included, Mageia actually has very good hardware support, which is one of the reasons I started using Mageia in the first place.

Despite all my whining about SystemD and changing distro, I am still with Mageia, because afterall, despite being an old Slackware user, I still appreciate things just working out of the box. Sure, my ability to fix things if stuff don't work out of the box surely is alot greater than the average GNU/Linux user. But downloading firmware on another machine, copying and reconfiguring (perhaps) the Kernel just for a first time installation is not my idea of fun. The convenience of Mageia so far outweighs the drawback of using SystemD. I am experimenting with other distroes, but I honestly don't have the possibility at the moment. Just to get a laptop up and running, to spend alot of time with that, no thanks, not currently.

I always recommend Mageia to people who are concerned about hardware support. Personally I have not tried all distroes, but I have tried Ubuntu and Fedora which have a reputation for good hardware support, but I find that Mageia has a better hardware support (at the times I tried those distroes).

So, bravo to the Mageia team. Not only have you put together a distro with great hardware support, but also a distro which is very easy to manage, even for newbs. Despite it being easy to manage for newbs, it is still also easy for more experienced people to freely administer the distro themselves, which is something I can't say for Fedora or Ubuntu, which has pretty much put up so many hinderances for advanced users, that the whole distro seems locked down and only usable for newbs.

A good test for a distro and newbie principle is to ask yourself, what does it take to configure-compile and run your own custom kernel on this distro? Out of many distroes I've tried, Mageia is one of the few ones where is is possible to do this in the classical (easy) way. You simply just configure and compile it, then run it. With some other distroes, it is virtually impossible to run your own kernel on it. Heck, some distroes almost break their integrity completely just by doing some legit changes on it that more experienced users might want to do.

This not a sad goodbye to Mageia but a mad one! They have a critical bug in the network software and I've been reporting it since version 6. Never got a reply to my bug report.
Now 8 is out and it got even worse. So bad in fact I left the distro for a different with no network issues and one that actually listens to the users!

courtrrb wrote:critical bug in the network software and I've been reporting it since version 6. Never got a reply to my bug report.

That was strange. Which bug?

Network sharing from the control center and now dhcpd stops after a couple hours requiring a reboot.

It is preferred to open a new topic concerning present issue.

What present issues? This has been going on since the alpha 1 of version 7 whan I reported itr.

And how does it help to hijack someone else's thread - do you think that will help fix the bugs you reported ?

courtrrb wrote:Network sharing from the control center

I still cant find it in bugzilla, please state bug number.

Should be this one: https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24642

Sorry to hear that, zilti. However, in my ThinkPad T430, Mageia 8 runs smoothly.