Mageia is a fork of Mandriva. Mandriva was
a name change from Mandrake. Mandrake was
a ( European ) fork of Red Hat, circa Jul 1998.
You can see a little bit of the history here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandriva_LinuxMageia of course uses RPM ( RedHat Program Manager ).
Fedora of course is the Community version of RedHat.
I've been fairly successful on taking RPM packages
out of the Fedora repos and installing them into
Mandriva/Mageia.
Maybe someone will step up here and define if
the future for Mageia will remain aligned with
Fedora/RedHat or move away from it.
If your building a BIG Corporate Linux install
your likely using RedHat/JBoss. Read all about
that here:
http://www.redhat.com/RedHat is the OS of choice for NASA so in kinda
of a distance connection, Mageia's cousin is being
used by NASA.
Adam Williamson, a big contributor and past site manager
for the Mandrake/Mandriva forum, was hired by RedHat.
Many of us here remember Adam fondly.