Mageia forum

Sorry if this seems a bit rough, but I wrote it just after installation and I am kinda frustrated. But I also propose something that can make the transition to Mageia less frustrating, hence I share my raw frustration here.

The major gripe I have is absence of a good beginners guide. If I were installing ArchLinux, chapters 4 and 5 of its beginners guide contains most actions needed to install most software for daily desktop usage and ease the path for newbs.

I wanted to install proprietary graphics drivers and flash. I managed to ¨enable¨ two extra repositories but couldnt make the package manager update to it and I am searching for the solution to that one as I write. I tried the update on the graphical tool and stuff, but no luck. I also played subtitled Anime videos in VLC, it refused to play certain formats and didnt play subtitles.

So I have to spend hours to google every single thing to set them all up?

Please compile a complete, self-contained, step-by-step beginnerś guide for the future, also help me by linking to individual resources for the below:

Basic usage of the package manager, both GUI and CLI for install, remove, update, dealing with non-free software.

Setting up proprietary graphics drivers. I also suspect some rare calibration issue for my monitor and the fonts are rendering small and ugly. I need that fixed.

Installing flash for Chrome and firefox

Installing proprietary codecs so that such issues wont bother me later. If I have installed VLC, I dont want it to ever claim ¨unsupported codecs¨ when it could have supported them.

As I write, I found some possible localization artifacts: my double quote key throws up accented characters even though I set everything to English.

This is not complete, I hope to elaborate on it later. And I expect a lot from you since I loved Mandriva and KDE for a long time and had to give it up for the last 5 years in favor or Arch, Kubuntu and Ubuntu. Cheers!

aitchnyu wrote:Sorry if this seems a bit rough, but I wrote it just after installation and I am kinda frustrated. But I also propose something that can make the transition to Mageia less frustrating, hence I share my raw frustration here.

The major gripe I have is absence of a good beginners guide.

We are a brand new distribution and there is so much work still to do, ...

aitchnyu wrote:I wanted to install proprietary graphics drivers and flash. I managed to ¨enable¨ two extra repositories but couldnt make the package manager update to it and I am searching for the solution to that one as I write. I tried the update on the graphical tool and stuff, but no luck.

What are you calling "extra repositories" ? You need the media nonfree and tainted. It is easy in the MCC (the graphical tool), it is the same that in Mandriva you seem to know.

aitchnyu wrote:Please compile a complete, self-contained, step-by-step beginnerś guide for the future

It's on the Todolist

aitchnyu wrote:Installing proprietary codecs so that such issues wont bother me later. If I have installed VLC, I dont want it to ever claim ¨unsupported codecs¨ when it could have supported them.

Once the media nonfree and tainted activated, under root in a console :
# urpmi a52dec faad2 ffmpeg ffmpeg2theora gstreamer0.10-a52dec gstreamer0.10-amrnb gstreamer0.10-cdio gstreamer0.10-cdparanoia gstreamer0.10-dts gstreamer0.10-dv gstreamer0.10-faad gstreamer0.10-farstream gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-flac gstreamer0.10-gme gstreamer0.10-gnomevfs gstreamer0.10-gsm gstreamer0.10-lame gstreamer0.10-mms gstreamer0.10-mpeg gstreamer0.10-musepack gstreamer0.10-neon gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-base gstreamer0.10-plugins-good gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-pulse gstreamer0.10-resindvd gstreamer0.10-rtmp gstreamer0.10-soup gstreamer0.10-speex gstreamer0.10-tools gstreamer0.10-twolame gstreamer0.10-voip gstreamer0.10-wavpack gstreamer0.10-x264 gstreamer0.10-xvid flac lame lib64caca0 libdca-tools lib64dirac0 lib64dvdcss2 lib64enca0 libquicktime-dv libquicktime-faad libquicktime-lame libquicktime-x264 lib64xine1 lib64xvid4 mp3gain mpeg2dec speex twolame vorbis-tools vorbisgain x264
replacing "lib64" by "lib" if you are in i586

Some documentation already exists, at least in draft form:

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Category:Documentation

also

viewforum.php?f=36

Jim

@Lebarhon:



Also there's not much use of installing countless gstreamer codecs if the program you're using doesn't use gstreamer, so without context that's quite pointless to install all these codecs if you don't even tell which media player to use, IMHO ...