Moving on

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Moving on

Postby xtapetae » Nov 18th, '16, 01:03

It is with a certain melancholy that I give up using Mageia and move on back to OpenSuse. But I certainly will look in Mageia again. I was using it since version 3 as a production system and was quite satisfied with it. In all that time I never experienced any serious problem. Thank you very much for providing this nice distribution.
Why stop using it then? I have difficulties with your upgrade policy of “when its ready”. I need to plan in advance as setting up my systems costs me at least two days. I had this time in summer (when version 6 was originally expected) and I have it now (therefore I now switch) but I most probably will not have it during the two or three month when Mageia 6 may (or may not) be out. As your support for the old version ends quite abruptly after the new version is out I may end up with an unsupported system. This is different from Debian who also have a “when its ready” policy but they keep supporting their old version for much longer.
All this doesn't matter as long as you have enough temporal flexibility. But if you don't, this kind of unpredictability becomes a problem. I may not have been a typical Mageia user (and due to lack of time I was not a supporter) but I wanted to provide you with this feed back.

All the Best

CH
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Re: Moving on

Postby isadora » Nov 18th, '16, 09:34

As far as i know, Mageia 5 will be supported up onto three months after final release of Mageia 6.
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Re: Moving on

Postby filip » Nov 18th, '16, 10:26

isadora wrote:As far as i know, Mageia 5 will be supported up onto three months after final release of Mageia 6.

Yeah, that's official.

xtapetae I'm sorry to read you go. I understand your frustration but we just don't have the man power that Debian have. In my view our community is more open and friendly than theirs. We also have very user friendly OS management tools. Well, I hope you'll eventually return.
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Re: Moving on

Postby dirkme » Nov 25th, '16, 04:33

So, but I do prefer a “when its ready” policy, rather than getting a faulty distro out just to release it.

Having said this, that is another plus I like on Mageia, so don't change that but maybe extend the :old" release time by a few month, just in case.

Bytheway, how do you upgrade to the latest version?

Thanks
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Re: Moving on

Postby xboxboy » Nov 25th, '16, 05:05

You can upgrade by various methods.

Are you on mageia 4? or 5 and just want the updates?

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/URPMI talks about the update tool, which can both update your software, or upgrade the OS to the latest version. Mageia 6 is still being created, Mageia 5 is the latest and greatest, with Mageia 5.1 almost due for release, where 5.1 is simply Mageia 5 with the updates rolled in.

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_5_Release_Notes#Upgrading_from_Mageia_4 Tells how to upgrade from mageia 4 to 5.

If you truly want the latest, then you need Couldron! https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Cauldron
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Re: Moving on

Postby dirkme » Nov 25th, '16, 07:32

I had a bad luck experience but will install tomorrow Mageia 5 again testing (KDE)
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Re: Moving on

Postby petedan10 » Nov 27th, '16, 01:23

I admit I take a look at other distributions from time to time. Sometimes I wonder if a specific distribution would be better for a specific machine or purpose. But after all I can say that Mageia (and Mandrake/Mandriva before that) has provided the best experience. Not only the nice installer and user friendly approach and nice features, but also the friendly community :-)

So I can understand xtapetae's melancholy and do believe he will come to the same conclusion :-)
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Re: Moving on

Postby dirkme » Nov 27th, '16, 02:37

petedan10 wrote:I admit I take a look at other distributions from time to time. Sometimes I wonder if a specific distribution would be better for a specific machine or purpose. But after all I can say that Mageia (and Mandrake/Mandriva before that) has provided the best experience. Not only the nice installer and user friendly approach and nice features, but also the friendly community :-)

So I can understand xtapetae's melancholy and do believe he will come to the same conclusion :-)

Yep, the friendly community, can underline that. This great, but i just can't get basic programs installed, maybe I spend to much time with Arch, it is just simople, everything you want is there.

I wanted to have a European based distro and I still have a Mageia install on a HDD but I need to have more time to figure stuff out, right now I ned something hw==what just works and that is Arch to me.
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Re: Moving on

Postby doktor5000 » Nov 27th, '16, 17:00

dirkme wrote:This great, but i just can't get basic programs installed, maybe I spend to much time with Arch, it is just simople, everything you want is there.

Arch definitely has a bigger software repository, but wrt installation, how did you try?
Code: Select all
urpmi packagename

is the same as
Code: Select all
pacman -Sy packagename
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Re: Moving on

Postby dirkme » Nov 28th, '16, 01:00

I did download the POL package for Fedora because I couldn't find it in the graphical software manager.

That was the End for it. For now.
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Re: Moving on

Postby petedan10 » Nov 28th, '16, 19:47

https://madb.mageia.org/package/show/name/playonlinux

So there was no need to download the Fedora package (which often works ok for simple smaller programs).
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Re: Moving on

Postby richardwest » Nov 28th, '16, 21:57

dirkme wrote:I did download the POL package for Fedora because I couldn't find it in the graphical software manager.

That was the End for it. For now.


gurpmi.png
Didn't try very hard
gurpmi.png (129.85 KiB) Viewed 6957 times
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Re: Moving on

Postby jiml8 » Nov 29th, '16, 01:35

One thing I think the packaging manager could use is a field showing what repo the package is from. Could be OP on this thread does not have the right repo enabled, and the previous post on this thread shows a screenshot, but it is not possible to determine which repo provides playonlinux, at least from the GUI.
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Re: Moving on

Postby Ken-Bergen » Nov 29th, '16, 03:41

jiml8 wrote: but it is not possible to determine which repo provides playonlinux, at least from the GUI.
Details: will tell you which repository provides the package but only if its not installed. :shock:
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Re: Moving on

Postby xboxboy » Nov 29th, '16, 05:05

jiml8 wrote:One thing I think the packaging manager could use is a field showing what repo the package is from. Could be OP on this thread does not have the right repo enabled, and the previous post on this thread shows a screenshot, but it is not possible to determine which repo provides playonlinux, at least from the GUI.


I agree, often I want to know if something is free or proprietary, but the GUI wont tell you :(
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Re: Moving on

Postby doktor5000 » Nov 29th, '16, 18:35

Well, we don't keep something like a transaction history like e.g. yum does, so we cannot really tell from which repo a package was installed, or if it was a local package.

As a workaround I can suggest the following, which comes from a function in ~/.bashrc here

Code: Select all
[doktor5000@Mageia5]─[17:32:12]─[~] declare -f ufn
ufn ()
{
    urpmf -f -m --name "$@" | sort
}


Works just fine and will tell you which repo a given package is contained in. Also listed in our software management MAQeia
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Re: Moving on

Postby dirkme » Mar 20th, '17, 22:14

doktor5000 wrote:
dirkme wrote:This great, but i just can't get basic programs installed, maybe I spend to much time with Arch, it is just simople, everything you want is there.

Arch definitely has a bigger software repository, but wrt installation, how did you try?
Code: Select all
urpmi packagename

is the same as
Code: Select all
pacman -Sy packagename


Thank you for your help, tried to fix my "wrong foot" approach ;-)

https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11680&p=68081#p68081
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Re: Moving on

Postby dirkme » Mar 20th, '17, 22:15

richardwest wrote:
dirkme wrote:I did download the POL package for Fedora because I couldn't find it in the graphical software manager.

That was the End for it. For now.


gurpmi.png


Thank you for your help, tried to fix my "wrong foot" approach ;-)

https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11680&p=68081#p68081
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Re: Moving on

Postby dirkme » Mar 20th, '17, 22:16

petedan10 wrote:https://madb.mageia.org/package/show/name/playonlinux

So there was no need to download the Fedora package (which often works ok for simple smaller programs).



Thank you for your help, tried to fix my "wrong foot" approach ;-)

https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=11680&p=68081#p68081
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Re: Moving on → back!

Postby xtapetae » Aug 1st, '17, 01:10

After having switched to OpenSuse I'm back to Mageia. It so happened that I had the time to spend a day for installation and there were both a new Suse and a new Mageia version. So I decided to go back to Mageia. It is not that I was unhappy with Suse but I was not happier than I had been with Mageia. The difference seems rather emotional than technical :-)

I think the weekly roundup on the Mageia blog is a great idea and I really hope that Mageia's diminished popularity on Distrowatch and the decreased traffic on this board are only temporary consequences of the delay of version 6 and that Mageia has a future. It is a really great distro. Thanks to all who keep it going!
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Re: Moving on

Postby isadora » Aug 1st, '17, 11:48

Welcome back xtapetae, and thanks for your nice words on behalf of all volunteers. :)
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Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
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Re: Moving on

Postby wintpe » Aug 22nd, '17, 11:34

Ive said this before and I want to say it again.

Mageia is an excellent distribution for a desktop, The best by a long way in my opinion and desktops should be used as commodity devices, and not provide long term resilient services.

this is in my opinion why windows server is still not as stable as well known linux servers

There is a distribution that is very similar to mageia that makes for a very stable, long term solution to run services on that are classed as production.

That is centos, or redhat if you can afford it.

You get 10 years of support with one revision, updates from minor revision to minor revision are seemless, (yum update), and as with redhat/centos 7.4 no reboot required, even for kernel updates.

run your production services on a Long term release, and keep mageia on the desktop.

taking this approach, upgrades from one mageia version to another are much less of an impact, and you can even abandon updates, and just adopt a practice of re-install, but keep home.

just my opinion of course, it works very well for me.

regards peter
Redhat 6 Certified Engineer (RHCE)
Sometimes my posts will sound short, or snappy, however its realy not my intention to offend, so accept my apologies in advance.
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Re: Moving on

Postby zeebra » Dec 9th, '17, 16:12

dirkme wrote:Yep, the friendly community, can underline that.


This is very true.

I tried Fedora a couple of years ago, and aside from the fact that it's horrible for advanced users who want to change anything outside of the dictate of Fedora: I almost got cancer from trying to get help with some relatively simple stuff in the Fedora distro that I wanted to do, something which I know how to do in other distroes, but which did not work in Fedora. The rudeness on that community was simply mindblowing. (anger management needed)

Sometimes it's easy to take for granted normal friendliness & manners...
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Re: Moving on

Postby jiml8 » Dec 10th, '17, 18:18

I have OpenSUSE on my laptop, and Mageia on my workstation. I work at my workstation when I am at home (most of the time) and at my laptop when traveling or when at my client's office. Workstation and laptop are kept synchronized through my cloud server which runs on my NAS.

This year has been my busiest year in the last several years; I have often been hitting 100 hours per week to get a firmware I have been working on out into the field. It is now out, as of a few weeks ago.

One consequence of this is that both my laptop and my workstation fell behind in terms of updates; I simply couldn't do it and I don't allow it to happen automatically because sometimes updates break things.

So, in October, I rolled my laptop from OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 to 42.3. A couple weeks later, I rolled my workstation from Mageia 5 to Mageia 6.

Now, my laptop is pretty much "full stock" and I expect updates to go reasonably smoothly. My workstation is rather heavily customized, and distro updates are usually a PITA.

So, I did the updates. the OpenSUSE update broke rather badly and rendered my laptop unbootable for awhile. Using a repair USB, I did manage to get it sorted out and working. It did, however, take some hours and I was not pleased.

Then I rolled my Mageia system forward. It proved to be a very painful exercise, and altogether I had probably 12 hours into doing it before it was mostly working. Then it took awhile to sort out a number of issues that remained.

But the basic point is that neither OpenSUSE nor Mageia updated smoothly. I don't really blame Mageia; as I say, my system deviates considerably from "stock". I DO blame OpenSUSE; that should have gone fine and didn't. It DID go fine on an OpenSUSE VM that I run on my workstation. I updated from OpenSUSE 13.2 to Leap 42.3 in this timeframe with no issues.

So, the moral of the story is that it doesn't matter what distro you run. Distro upgrades can really suck. This applies to Windows and to OSX as well. If your Mageia update goes badly, you need to ask yourself whether it was because the upgrader routine wasn't working or whether there is something in your system that is unexpected. In any case, you just have to deal with it.
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Re: Moving on

Postby xtapetae » Dec 17th, '17, 13:54

It is for exactly that reason why I gave up on distro updates. Whenever I install an update I set up a new and clean system. As a positive side effect I hope to get rid of all the rootkits I might have collected during the year.
To be practicable it requires two things.

1) My data is on a separate partition that is mounted on a directory in my home folder. This partition I do not reformat when doing a fresh install, of course.
2) I keep a list with all my expedient customizations and wherever feasible use bash scripts and stuff to automate the work.

Still it takes several hours. But -- touching wood -- during the last years I never experienced any serious problem.
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