Mageia forum

I am a ubuntu refugee and well I have been spending my time trying to find a distro to fill its place.
I have tried Mageia in the past and while it was okay I gave it a pass.
Mageia 3 seems to be a decent release though, I have played with it before and decided to give it a full go...

So first my complaints:

Codec installation is a pain, I mean come on its horrid trying to install codecs in mageia 3.
Other distros have an easy metapackage to install codecs, Ubuntu does as does openSUSE.
I understand why Mageia doesnt waant to ship codecs but when those codecs are a big pain to install practically one by one its annoying anod not intuitive.
I hope in future versions Mageia features a codec installer of some kind.
Now note this is my using the live DVD image, not the full install image.
But it should not matter, it should be a part of the post install process or something.

Second complaint:
Out of date Firefox

While not a major issue I do wish that Mageia had a more recent version of tghe browser due to some feature and spped improvements.

Speaking of firefox comes my main issue:

Flash does not work in firefox

I am using Mageia 3 64bit and am using the 64bit version of firefox, sadly Firefox does not detect flash as its a 32bit app.
But this is not an issue in other linux distros, I can use 64bit firefox but not have this issue= on other distros and I should not have to switch to 32bit mageia to use this.
can you help me fix this issue?
Perferbly without a total system reinstall but with 32bit?
Its a ripe pain in the bum, I did try to install flash 64bit in the repos but it wont install so there you go.

As a general hint and golden rule: Please only one problem per thread

Please have a look at our MAQeia for flash player plugin: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=880
and maybe in viewtopic.php?f=41&t=5337
flash is available for 64bit too, not sure why you think it's 32bit only ...

For Firefox please have a look at viewtopic.php?p=27347#p27347

MadmanRB wrote:Flash does not work in firefox

I am using Mageia 3 64bit and am using the 64bit version of firefox, sadly Firefox does not detect flash as its a 32bit app.
But this is not an issue in other linux distros, I can use 64bit firefox but not have this issue= on other distros and I should not have to switch to 32bit mageia to use this.
can you help me fix this issue?
Perferbly without a total system reinstall but with 32bit?
Its a ripe pain in the bum, I did try to install flash 64bit in the repos but it wont install so there you go.

Flash works fine when installed via the repos, Has for me anyway, also 64bit user.

Downside is I know of having to enable the non-free/tainted repos. in which flash is in

The codecs I agree on, its a pain , but having said that when vlc or whatever is installed it normally selects alot of the common ones used.

doktor5000 wrote:As a general hint and golden rule: Please only one problem per thread

Please have a look at our MAQeia for flash player plugin: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=880
and maybe in viewtopic.php?f=41&t=5337
flash is available for 64bit too, not sure why you think it's 32bit only ...

For Firefox please have a look at viewtopic.php?p=27347#p27347

Well its not like i didnt work out how to install flash or anything here.
The links you gave there are really no help as I already did everything on my end, so I am unsure why flash isnt being detected by firefox.

Edit:

okay the solution in the second one solve my issue...
very bizarre that you have to uninstall flash, reboot, install flash again to get it working.
Strange issue indeed.

MadmanRB wrote:I am a ubuntu refugee

I have none of those issues. I also use 64bit Mageia. Firefox could be a newer version, sure. But the new versioning system makes it look more outdated than it is! Basically this Firefox is really Firefox 4.2.x or something like that, while the newest is perhaps 4.4.x. It just looks more dramatic when they always change the first number in the version with none big updates. If you want the newest version you can download it from their homepage and put it in your home folder and run it from there seperately.

Codecs are easy! Activate the tainted repository and install the codecs you need. For me it was enough to install the tainted version of VLC and ffmpeg, the rest is included.
To get Flash working in Firefox I just installed the flash-plugin which is in the normal repository.

It's best to understand why Mageia choose not to install them by default, that is that they are binary blobs and patented software which have been reverse engineered (which is legal in Europe for example, and I think also in the US)

Don't install the 32 bit version of Mageia unless you have a 32 bit computer processor or less than 3gb of ram! Why would you do that? The 64 bit version is very complete and has all that you need, the rest you can install using 32 bit libraries in the 64 bit version!

Be a little bit more patient and I am sure you will come to like Mageia a lot! For me, I needed no patience, I liked it immediately.

zeebra wrote:Firefox could be a newer version, sure

It already is the latest version.

MadmanRB wrote:Edit:

okay the solution in the second one solve my issue...
very bizarre that you have to uninstall flash, reboot, install flash again to get it working.
Strange issue indeed.

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [SOLVED], thanks
And please next time use a meaningful thread title.