• Mageia 6 End of Life – Time to Upgrade

  As you know, Mageia 7 was released this summer, followed shortly after by Mageia 7.1. It is time to say goodbye to Mageia 6 – updates have stopped, including security updates.
  As usual, before the upgrade, do a backup of your data and documents.

• [PCLinuxOS] Screenshot Showcase

• PCLinuxOS Family Member Spotlight: Revoluz

  Why and when did you start using Linux?
  2006 Open-Suse, 6 Months later PCLinuxOS my only distro.

  What specific equipment do currently use with PCLinuxOS?
  Office, Graphics, Multimedia - Jack-Audio, HTML Website build and not so often anymore, 3D CAM

  Do you feel that your use of Linux influences the reactions you receive from your computer peers or family? If so, how?
  Trying to make people curious by talking about it.

  What would you like to see happen within PCLinuxOS that would make it a better place. What are your feelings?
  That Mini Live CD correspond to the Sinn Mini, only for the wide hardware compatibility and peripherals such as printers and scanners.

OpenMandriva is one of the few Linux distributions (and arguably the only prominent one) that uses LLVM Clang as its default compiler toolchain over GCC for building its packages and the preferred C/C++ compiler exposed to its users. One of the last hold outs for this Clang'ed Linux distribution has been the kernel build but that is now no longer a blocker.

With the new LLVM Clang 9.0 release, it's now possible to use LLVM Clang to compile the mainline Linux kernel for x86_64 and Arm without needing any out-of-tree patches. In my testing of Clang 9 + Linux 5.3 it's worked out well with a few exceptions like the AMDGPU driver having issues, but those few remaining headaches are being worked out so Clang'ing the Linux kernel works well for users and helps ensure code/compiler portability of the kernel.

The timing for Mageia 7, just prior to the recent release of the new AMD Ryzen 3000 series of CPU’s, didn’t play nicely. Namely, there was an issue with the system starting up on these new CPU’s that prevented any type of installation, except for a net install. So, the only solution was to release a new set of installation media, which are available to download here.

It’s very important to note that if you have a working system, there is nothing that you need to address. This release is primarily to fix installation on systems with the above CPU’s.

Also: Mageia 7.1 Released With Systemd Fix For AMD Ryzen 3000 Systems

Mageia is a user friendly, desktop-oriented Linux distribution. The project originally grew out of the Mandriva family of distributions and is independently developed. The project's latest release is Mageia 7 which, according to the project's release notes, offers 18 months of support. Mageia 7 drops support for the ARMv5 architecture while adding support for 64-bit ARM (Aarch64) and improving support for ARMv7. While ARM packages are being built, ARM installation media is not yet featured on the project's download page. The new release includes the DNF command line package manager and features the ability to play MP3 files - MP3 support was not included by default in previous releases due to patent restrictions.

The release notes mention that GNOME users can enjoy their desktop running on a Wayland session by default with X.Org available as an alternative. KDE Plasma users will have the opposite experience with their desktop running on X.Org and a Wayland session available through a package in the distribution's repositories. The documentation also mentions that when running a GNOME on Wayland session some graphical administrator tools will not work when run through su or sudo. The user can run these tools with their regular user privileges and the system will prompt for an admin password when necessary.

Mageia is available for the 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64) architectures. We can either download an install DVD with multiple desktop packages bundled or we can download live media with the Plasma, GNOME, or Xfce desktops. There are smaller net-install disc images available too. I decided to try the KDE Plasma live disc which is a 2.8GB download.

Booting from the live media brings up a menu which gives us the option of immediately loading the project's system installer or launching a live desktop environment. Choosing the live desktop brings up a series of graphical screens asking us to select our language from a list, confirm the distribution's license agreement, and we are offered a chance to read the release notes. We are then asked to select our time zone from a list and confirm our keyboard's layout.