What follows from here is my look at the Mandriva vs. Mageia battle for supremacy on my machines. I’ve been using Mandriva for a long time (since the 8.2 days) and many of the reasons I chose it initially such as ease of use, active community, constant innovation, stability, common server/desktop and amazing configuration tools (DrakX), have remained the same and stopped tempting migrations to Fedora, Ubuntu or Suse. However some things change. Mandriva’s commercial stability has been lacking for a long time, which produced the laying off of a large group of developers – the same developers who decided they’d had enough and created Mageia.

Mageia being a fork of Mandriva has allowed it to keep many of the features as above, and the time has come for a decision: stay with Mandriva, move to Mageia or consider something else entirely.

Please note that I prefer to keep all installations that I manage the same, including servers and desktops, which does remove many other excellent distributions from consideration and also is why Mageia is my first port of call.

Mandriva vs. Mageia – Summary

I have followed the development of both distributions since the announcement with eagerness and interest. Here is my summary of the current status and paths of each:

Mandriva

• Heavy development of new UI tools for easier use (some describe as ‘Mac’ like)
• New investment in the company with Russian money (ROSA Labs)
• Attempting to make a huge jump in lots of new software at once – including RPM5 and systemd
• Delays due to reduced personnel and the huge amount of changes.
• Changeable focus and release schedules
• Upgradeable from previous versions but with some difficulty (due major software changes)

Mageia

• Started with Mandriva 2010.1 but with all packages cleaned and upgraded to the latest versions
• Very, very stable pre-releases (as well as the first release Mageia 1)
• No major changes to the implementation
• Very active new community and good work being done with other distributions
• Allows the community to define the direction, development and core ideas in theory and especially in practice
• Upgradeable from Mandriva 2010.1 officially – see the upgrade guide

Mageia Review

The team at Mageia have taken their time to set up their systems and process for long term success and survivability. These considerations molded what the first release Mageia 1 was going to be like.

The stated focus was:

• Building the Build System
• Start from Mandriva 2010.1, clean, review and rebuild everything
• No major changes – just software updates
• Only include packages as requested

All of this resulted in Mageia 1′s pre-releases (Alpha, Betas, RC) and final release all being exceptionally stable, matching all the features from the best Mandriva release 2010.1 and creating a very clean base to build from. There were no huge failures post release, no obvious beta software included and no controversial or courageous decisions. Just a very solid a capable release.

I won’t rehash other full reviews of Mageia 1. It truly is just a very updated Mandriva 2010.1.

New packages, missing packages

All package in Mageia are cleaned and updated. As such it includes: Linux Kernel 2.6.38, KDE 4.6.3, Gnome 2.32, XFCE 4.8.1, Firefox 4, LibreOffice 3.3.2 and VirtualBox 4.0.6. See the Release Notes for further information.

However if no-one was found to maintain a package, clean and rebuild it, it wasn’t included. As such Mageia 1 ships with much less available software than Mandriva 2010.1, but everything works, most packages people want are there and many more a being added post release.

Repositories and naming

During development of Mageia 1 there was a large (somewhat epic) discussion on how to manage the repositories, names for each and what they should hold. The rolling development release is called Cauldron and works much like Mandriva’s Cooker.

The repositories are:

• Core – free open source packages. The default repository for most packages.
• Non-free – free of charge but not open source packages. E.g. Nvidia and AMD graphics drivers
• Tainted – packages that might infringe on patents in some countries. A la PLF for Mandriva or RPM Fusion for Fedora.

Desktop Look and Feel

Mageia stripped out the icons, wallpaper and theme from Mandriva and started again. The dotted wallpaper is nice and basic in my opinion, but is easily changed to many other nicer ones.

Mageia Control Center (MCC)

I much prefer the new icons in the KDE system tray and Mageia Control Center (MCC) as shown.

Mageia KDE System Tray

However the main point of difference on the desktop, and the only point of controversy is the look of the fonts. That’s right, not the fonts themselves but the way they look. Mageia has decided to enable autohinting which produces cleaner, slimmer fonts. Some say it looks ugly (Bug 175), others like it. Now, I used to be in the “ugly” camp and made sure that my Mandriva installations disabled the PLF version of the fonts which had this effect. However I’ve changed my mind after trying them out for a while and quite like them.

One other change is that KDE seems a lot more stable than previously – including that using the nepomuk file search from within dolphin actually works, in real time and doesn’t drastically slow the machine in the background. Though this is due not so much the Mageia team but to the new KDE version and the great work of the KDE team – so all distributions should also be enjoying the benefits.

Release schedule

Both Mandriva and Mageia are departing from the 6 month release schedule of the Mandriva 2010 series. Mandriva is moving to yearly release whilst after much discussion Mageia is moving to a 9 monthly release cycle. Mageia’s next release is scheduled for 4th April 2012.

The Decision

Mageia continues to do everything I wanted from Mandriva and adds excellent stability, transparency and has shown a great willingness to take greater input and direction from the community. The 9 month release schedule allows for up to date software, but allows enough time to make sure all is stable before release without manic last minute bugs being left.

I have decided to migrate all my Mandriva installations to Mageia and to hopefully participate more as part of the Mageia community.

The migration story so far…

For each machine I’ve moved so far to Mageia I’ve listed the machine specs, previous Mandriva version if any, install type, Mageia edition and a few comments from the install.

Machine 1: Laptop

• Specs: Toshiba Satellite A100 – Intel Core Duo T2300, 1GB RAM, GeForce Go 7300
• Previously: Mandriva 2010.1 32bit Powerpack
• Currently: Mageia 1 32bit KDE via fresh install
  My first install of Mageia was to my own laptop to get a feel of things. I tested the Beta 1 (fresh install), Beta 2 (upgrade),  RC (upgrade) and final (fresh install) and found amazing stability – no crashes or major hiccups at all. It has also certainly also felt quite a bit faster than the previous Mandriva 2010.2. As the Skype packages for Mandriva don’t work anymore, I installed Skype using the notes as shown here.

Machine 2: Desktop

• Specs: AMD Phenom II X4 965BE, 8GB RAM, ATI Radeon 4770
• Previously: Mandriva 2010.2 64bit Powerpack (with many backports)
• Currently: Mageia 1 64bit KDE via upgrade
  Upgraded via the command line with urpmi as per the Mageia upgrade guide. No settings went awry and all worked well. Left over packages from Mandriva that had no Mageia equivalent continue to work correctly. Feels slightly faster.

Machine 3: MythTV HDTV Media Center

• Specs: AMD Athlon X2 6000+, 4G Ram, ATI Radeon X1250 (690G), Dvico FusionHDTV card
• Previously: Mandriva 2010.2 64bit Powerpack
• Currently: Mageia 1 64bit LXDE via upgrade
  Upgraded via the command line using urpmi cleanly but ssh remote connection. TV card continued to work without issues. Still running Mandriva PLF MythTV packages for the moment – I didn’t want to risk that upgrade not working yet. Stopped mythtv services to ensure mysql clean upgrade before restarting for the new kernel.

Machine 4: Laptop

• Specs: Toshiba Portege M800 in Pink – Intel Core 2 Duo P7350, 2GB RAM, Intel Mobile 4 Graphics
• Previously: Mandriva 2010.1 64bit Powerpack
• Currently: Mageia 1 64bit KDE via upgrade
  Most risky upgrade – my wife’s laptop. Upgraded safely with no lost settings or files. Main difference was the font look change as mentioned above. Microphone continues the same habit of not working as seen under Mandriva. Overall a great success!

Machine 5: Production Web and Database Server

• Specs: Intel Xeon 3.0Ghz (P4 based with HT), 2GB Ram, 2x80GB HDD in Raid 1 (mdadm)
• Previously: Mandriva 2009.0/2009.1 Hybrid 64bit
• Currently: Mageia 1 64bit via online upgrade
  This server has been constantly upgraded from Mandriva 2007.1 onwards. As only upgrades from 2010.1 are officially supported I felt this was a bit risky, but worth a try. I allocated enough time to rebuild from scratch if needed, however it was not necessary. To reduce the risk I ran urpmi with the extra –test option to make sure all packages were available for install first. All services came up successfully to my pleasant surprise. I did spend a couple of hours slowly removing leftover packages that had slowly built up over time – including 14 obsolete kernels.

I checked around for a more up-to-date rpm for Mandriva 2010.0 but none currently exists. There is 0.8.41 and 0.8.53 avaliable for 2010.1 and cooker. So…. one of three decisions to make.

1. Upgrade the server to 2010.1
2. Use either the 2010.1 or cooker nginx package on my existing install
3. Request a backport for 2010.0
4. Backport the package myself

Since this is a stable server an entire upgrade is a big risk and 2010.0 has a longer support timeframe, option 1 can be ignored. The same can be said about running packages not designed for the system. There goes option 2.

I decided to do both option 3 (Mandriva Bug Report) and 4.

I’ve never built an rpm before and thought that it was about time to learn, especially as I’d like to build up to being a maintainer/packager for the recently forked Mageia. So I set up a 2010.0 64bit build server and a 64bit test server and started using the Mandriva RPM Howto.

I downloaded the cooker source rpm for nginx 0.8.53 and rebuilt it for 2010.0.

Success! nginx-0.8.53-2mdv2010.0.x86_64.rpm

Since I now have the rpms (and along with my desire to do more packaging) I decided to use genhdlist2 and my rsync server to create my own repository – CyprixRPMS.

Using my own repo I upgraded my main server to 0.8.53 after basic testing on my 64bit test virtual machine.

You can add my repo with the command below as root (or sudo) for Mandriva 2010.0 64bit.

urpmi.addmedia cyprixrpms rsync://proteus.cyprix.com.au::cyprixrpms/mandriva/2010.0/x86_64

If you have any feedback on my rpms please email me.

It will be running a variety of applications including:

• Mandriva Linux 2010.0
• Web Serving: Nginx, Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3
• Mail: Postfix, Dovecot, RoundCube
• DNS: PowerDNS, Bind
• Database: MySQL
• Virtual Hosting: VirtualBox

Server Specifications:

• Intel SR1530HSH with S3200SHVL Motherboard. 320w PSU, 3x Hot Swap SATA HDD, 2x Gb Nic
• Intel Q9550 Processor – 4x 2.83ghz, 12mb cache, e0 stepping
• Intel Q9400 Processor – 4x 2.66ghz, 6mb cache, r0 stepping
• 4x 2gb (8gb total) Kingston DDR2 800Mhz Ram
• 2x 1Tb Seagate Hard Drives (in RAID 1)

Update: Unfortunately, the E0 stepping Q9550 is not supported for the bios of the s3200 motherboard, so I’ve had to switch down to the Q9400 with only 6mb cache .

Photos:

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Front

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Rear

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Top

Intel SR1530HSH 1U Server - Inside

On apache, this can occur when your wordpress directory does not have write permissions for the apache user. But I’d already checked that. So I got thinking…

Since nginx and php fastcgi are separate processes I checked the users they were running under – lo and behold the php-fcgi was running under root!!! Big oops! Solution: change php-fcgi to run as user nginx & group nginx (same as the nginx server under Mandriva). As I currently use the spawn-fcgi program I changed by init.d file to use the user and group options as shown below.

/usr/local/bin/spawn-fcgi -u nginx -g nginx

All fixed

At some stage I’ll post my init.d file for php-fcgi and my nginx configuration files once they become somewhat stable.

First thoughts? Nginx is super fast, reasonably easy to configure (once you figure out the php issues) and saves a heap on memory. Downside? I’ve had the odd niggle with moving old sites across – especially since I’m moving to php 5.3 and MySQL 5.1 at the same time, otherwise all good.

The other major change is the look of this blog. The old K2 theme was becoming an issue to deal with (mainly because I didn’t update it enough) so I’ve now moved to this lovely theme: inove. I’ve also done a fresh wordpress install of 2.8.4 and added pretty links – so anyone linking to the old structure might have the odd issue, but otherwise should be painless. Oh yeah – any images on the older posts (pre Aug 2009) are gone.

Anyway here is a list of upgrades currently underway:

• php 5.2.x to 5.3.0
• mysql 5.0 to mysql-max 5.1
• apache 2.2/mod_php to nginx 0.8.10/php-fcgi
• athlon64 2ghz 1gb ram to athlon64 X2 2ghz 2gb ram
• mandriva 2008.x/2009.x to 2010.0 (Cooker)
• wordpress 2.x.x to 2.8.4
• mediawiki 1.x to 1.15.1
• bind 9 to powerdns 2.9.22
• and a few more that i’ve forgotten about

If you’re like me and hate the things with a vengeance, you can get rid of every single one of them using the linux command line below.

updatedb;for i in `locate Thumbs.db|sed 's/ /\__/g'`;do rm -vf "`echo $i | sed 's/__/\\ /g'`";done;

Update 21 Oct 2009: added for loop with sed commands to safety handle spaces, round brackets and single quotes etc. in the file path

I’ve been wanting to do this for years and has actually been the major stopper in Mandriva becoming my primary OS on my desktop (besides my laptop(s), wifes laptop, friends laptops, and all my servers). I always figured I could dual-boot for LAN parties.

Anyway… I did it like this.

Step 1. Install Mandriva 2009.1 Spring Powerpack (64bit)

Step 2. Setup online repositories including PLF mirrors

Step 3. Install dvb-apps and most other dvb utils (run `urpmq dvb- -a` to see them)

Step 4. Install mplayer, smplayer and usual auto installed plf codecs

Step 5. (as per v4l mailing list) Download ‘extract_xc3028.pl’ script, and drivers

Step 6. Extract driver and copied it to `/lib/firmware` (do not use Chris Pascoe’s firmware as it is not req’d – and not working)

Step 7. (following instructions from the ubuntu forums) Run `scandvb /usr/share/dvb-apps/scan/dvb-t/au-Melbourne > channels.conf`

Step 8.  Run `sudo cp channels.conf /etc && cp channels.conf ~/.tzap`

Step 9. Test Setup – run `mplayer dvb://”ABC2″`

Step 10. Due to all Australian HDTV channels using AC3 onlyfor sound we need to set the PIDS correctly for the audio as AC3 is by default 0. If you don’t you won’t get any sound on any of the HD channels.

Step 11. For each channel (ABC, 7, 9, 10 and SBS) run `tzap -c /etc/channels.conf -r “ABC1″` <- replacing “ABC1″ with the channel name. Then in a new console run scandvb -c and save the contents.

Step 12. Convert the AC3 values from hex to decimal. (Hint google: convert ….. to decimal)

Step 13. Edit /etc/channels.conf and add the decimal AC3 values in the file. Replace the zero in …:0:… with the AC3 value.

Step 14. Enjoy.

Ahhh

What a load of crock! I suppose nobody ever accused MS of being ethical (at least without the sarcasm).

Why does this make any sense at all. I mean just look at this process:
Step 1 – Buy 17,000 Classmate PCs with Mandriva Linux preinstalled
Step 2 – See machines working correctly
Step 3 – Have machines shipped
Step 4 – Pay for hardware and software
Step 5 – Install MS Windoze on all PCs (?!&?*?#$!!!!!)

How the hell does any of that work? Is Microsoft just playing dirty wherever it can? Do they just want to subsidise African nations computer needs?

If they want to pay me to use MS Windows, send me a message.

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Mandriva Linux 2008.0 is out and going strong. Keeping that in mind, I have now updated this server to run 2008.0 with very few problems (via urpmi –auto-select). This is a first for me with any Mandriva server. Well done guys!

I’ve also installed the Powerpack on my Toshiba Satellite 2410 laptop with no real issues, but with great new fonts and features (like automount ntfs-3g) all around.

For the last month (and a bit) I’ve been running Mandriva 2007.1 Spring PowerPack on my Toshiba Satellite 2410. To avoid people having to skip to the conclusion, I’m sticking with Mandriva Linux Spring on my laptop permanently!

In the past I’ve only run WinXP as my primary operating system on this laptop (feel free to flame away), and either dual booted to Mandriva, or run a MandrivaOne disc. However, due to certain apps and features not working correctly or stably previously, I haven’t permanently converted. These apps/features include:

• Hibernate to RAM
• Hibernate to Disk
• NTFS-3G on FUSE (writing to NTFS)
• Power Management and CPU Scaling
• OpenOffice 2 (matching my desktop + OpenDocumentFormat etc.)
• Easy wireless management
• Proprietary nVidia driver
• MS fonts

Laptop Specs:

• Toshiba Satellite 2410
• Intel P4-M 1.7GHz
• 784MB DDR RAM
• nVidia 32MB GeForce4 420Go (not 16mb as per my previous reviews)
• D-Link DWL-G680 Wireless 802.11b/g (Turbo and XR) [Atheros PC-Card]

Installation & Configuration

I did a fresh install from the PowerPack DVD with only one unexpected problem. When installing the grub bootloader, it would hang. Using Ctrl+ALt+F1, killing the grub install via console, returning to the installer (Ctrl+Alt+F7) and clicking “retry” fixed the problem and it installed the bootloader fine the second time. Not sure why it happens but it did occur with the previous Mandriva Linux with grub but not with lilo. However grub is now the default for Spring. 1st problem solved.

As I knew that my Toshiba Laptop screen can be funny with the proprietary nVidia driver, I picked the free driver during install. First boot worked great. I particularly liked the new KDE splash screen (image to come). I noticed that both my wireless card and the power management was installed correctly (along with beagle which I removed) and were very easy to configure. The new wireless (or at least updated) system works great.

After configuring the power management I tried out the Hibernate to RAM and disk functions. Hibernate to RAM works well, and even disables and enable my wireless properly. 1st time I ran Hibernate to Disk it worked great, however ever since then it instantly starts up again. I’ll have to work out a fix for that in future.

As Spring comes with Firefox 2 (which I prefer) and OpenOffice2, I didn’t need to worry about upgrading. I don’t really like the Mandriva Firefox theme, so if you change to EVG theme then back to default and restart Firefox you will have the normal theme again.

As usual my laptop has a problem running the proprietary nVidia drivers due to the screen blanking. After scouring the web, nVidia forums and with great help from the Mandriva bugzilla team I found that this thing is common for this range of Toshiba laptops. Thankfully this has been resolved before. It involves setting up a special binary file, but if you need more info check out my bugzilla listing.

Proprietary drivers up and running, I tried out metisse, compiz and beryl on the laptop. Metisse worked great but I’m not sure I’ll need it for my workloads. Compiz and beryl looked great, but really my itty bitty p4-m 1.7 and a 3mb graphics card don’t really cut it. I only saw one problem with compiz/beryl, where the background will go black whilst the current window shows normally. Either resizing the window or flipping to the console and returning seems to fix it temporarily, but I don’t think I’ll try to fix this due to my laptop speed.

As usual I setup my update repositories via easyUrpmi, however I have now moved to using the distrib-coffee mirror as my default.

There is a great setup guide for Mandriva 2007.1 Spring for free users at HowToForge but there are some tips for PowerPack users too. From the tips on page 7, I installed the MS truetype fonts, and hey presto! stuff looks the same as on a windows box. Make sure you add your update repositories before installing the fonts as there are a few prerequisites.

Installed the ntfs-3g package with success, and managed to mount my NTFS formatted external hard drive with no problems. I can’t wait for someone to integrate this with the KDE automount system *hint hint*

Extra Features

Some nice features have been added for this release. Namely very tight virtualisation with Xen, qemu, VirtualBox and VMware Player. I’m yet to have time to play around with these to much yet. The other feature I love was the install script for Google Earth on the menu. Worked great with no messing about. Just one question. Why does the install script stay in the menu after the program has been installed?

Gone Missing

Last time around Mandriva added LinDVD, a proprietary DVD pack from the same guys that make WinDVD. However it isn’t there now. I shall be going back to my old disks to install it, but what about everyone else? Desktop linux users should be able to legally play dvds.

A month on…

After using this as my primary OS (well only OS) on my laptop, I’m happy to keep it this way. Great stability, great apps and excellent configuration with only minor hiccups. I may still try and fix Hibernate to Disk, but it isn’t high on my priority list. Mandriva seems to be heading in the right direction with this release, despite some internal reorganisation. A couple of great releases on the trot, let’s hope they we can make it three.

Creating interest in linux

As a side note I love playing SuperTux and the odd Frozen Bubble. When sitting I’m around at Uni, taking a few moments to relax, I usually whip out SuperTux. It seems this is quite popular and I usually get a small crowd watching over my shoulder, with the odd call out of “can I get that?”. Maybe we should all play a game in public to promote linux!