Is this beta for one of the best community-run distros around a good indicator for the full release, or a serious work-in-progress like last year?

it’s about time we stopped harping on about how surprised we were when Mageia’s initial  release became somewhat of an overnight  sensation just under two years ago. The release of Mageia 2 last year proved it wasn’t just a one-hit wonder, with improvements across the board making it truly one of the best  distros available today. As development nears the end for Mageia 3, we look at the second beta to try to get an idea of what the next instalment will bring us.

                                First of all, going by the features list, not much has changed this time around. The usual updates are there for packages and the most noticeable change is the inclusion of a graphical boot menu, similar to Fedora 18’s. A fairly major change is  coming before the final release with a switch to systemd for   the installer, but that’s not fully implemented yet. n Mageia and its Control Center are returning in the updated distro. 

                                          The installation process slightly differs depending on which version of the ISO you get – of which currently the  usual dual-architecture version is not available. As well as  the individual desktop spins that clock in at about 1.5GB for each desktop environment and architecture, there’s the full DVD offering more choice. The spins give you a quick and somewhat minimal install, with a very watered down graphical installer compared to the full version. 

                         The full drakx version takes you through the installation process step-by-step, with good defaults and plenty of options to fully customise the process. There is a small problem with both versions of the installer, though. First of all, they’re both supposed to install GRUB 2 by default, which they don’t always do. Secondly, the installer  tries to install GRUB to the wrong location. If you don’t catch  it in time, you will end up having to do some creative GRUB installation independently, or go through the installation process again. 

                                          It’s a known bug for the Mageia dev team, so it will hopefully be fixed before the final release. At least the installation itself isn’t too time-consuming, taking no longer than 15-20 minutes on a decent, modern machine. A brief user setup process follows this quick install.  However, once we were into the desktop environment we  were hit with a massive, two-stage update that took about half an hour to complete. 

                                             This is more than likely due to the fact that packages are being constantly updated as part of the QA process, and it at the very least fixed some of the graphical issues that we had briefly experienced after the initial install. Some of the major packages for the distro are pre-release versions, with the expectation that they will be final versions by the full release. The repos no longer have the common Mandrake issue of only wanting to use a live CD as a source, so you have full access to the pretty extensive Mageia  packages. In our tests, sudo and YUM were not installed by  go through the graphical package manager to begin with.

                                           This resides in the fantastic Mageia Control Center, which still allows you full control over almost every aspect of your system with good graphical tools. The distro is clearly not quite ready for mass consumption yet – but compared to last year, it’s in a much better state.  We’re looking forward to the full release, which is currently  planned for the beginning of May.  It’s a development release, which means it has its issues, but it seems a lot more mature than it was at the same point last year. There isn’t much major changing in this version. However, it still provides the easy-to-use experience, but now with more up-to-date packages.


Pros 

 A decent postinstall package  clean-up leads to  the familiar and  very usable Mageia  desktop with the  usual frills.

Cons 

Not much new so far, although the installer’s default recommendations break GRUB for the system, so it’s definitely a beta.

  The GRUB installation can be a problem

 The single desktop environment  installer is much simpler

A good selection of software is available by default

  The repos contain a mixture of free and non-free packages

 The Control Center is a portal to full system configuration

 We look at the bootable installations of Linux available to help you cut through the various options available
  
1. Level of support

 Once you have determined which system(s), and therefore which user(s) will be using Linux, you’ll need to consider their familiarity (if any) with the Linux environment and hence the potential learning curve for the tasks that they are supposed to perform. Most major vendors such as Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc. do provide commercial support offerings (including planning for deployment). Other major distros which do not provide  commercial support usually do provide  reliable  community-assisted  support but  then youobviously cannot expect committed levels of support. 

2. package management 

In addition to the well established DEB and RPM systems, a few other alternatives are coming up and growing every day, such as pacman of ArchLinux. This becomes an all the more important question for desktops, where hasslefree    management of packages takes precedence over  optimization obtained through compiling the sources.  You might  as well    have prepared  a  list  of  the programs/ applications that you will use in Linux in order to carry out your routine business tasks. For each of them, determine  what binary packages (if any) do their original developers  officially provide for your architecture. Applying security  patches, bug fixes and other updates becomes much  easier in this manner. Also check whether the software package    is  provided  as  a binary for  your architecture  in  your distribution’s official repositories, which is usually known not to conflict with other packages installed.

3. Hardware compatibility 


Where possible,   run  the    shortlisted    distros   in  the  target  system in a live mode. Even if the target system does not contain any optical disc drive, freely available tools such as Unetbootin make creation of live USB drives (from the corresponding ISO images) a piece of cake for a large number of distros. However, an installed system will generally    tend    to    detect    a    greater    amount    of    hardware     than what the live system does. Hence, use the live experience just as a guideline and not as a final decision  making criteria to evaluate hardware compatibility.  Running under virtualization too may not determine the accurate status of compatibility of different devices. In many cases, documentation available on the distro’s website may contain a hardware compatibility list which will assist you in resolving compatibility issues. You also need    to    check    with    your    system’s    OEM    too,  many  of  them   provide device drivers for Linux, often in the form of binary packages that are customized for a specific distro. 

4. partitioning constraints

 This applies mainly to dual/multi-boot systems. If you have, say, 4 installations of Windows on different partitions on a single hard disk, such as XP, Vista, 7 and 8, it means that each of these is a primary partition and hence, in most    cases,  you  are  out of  luck  if  the distro  you are  going  to install requires a separate partition of it’s own (which is usually the case). However, there are exceptions. You can install general purpose distributions such as Ubuntu using Wubi, as well as special-purpose distributions such as Geexbox to the hard disk, without creating another partition at all in any of these cases. In case your hard disk has 3 primary paritions instead of 4 (and none of these 3 can be deleted/formatted), your best bet is to create an extended partition first (as the fourth partition) and then install Linux within a partition there, so as to leave room for easy modification if need be. Most Linux distributions  can  be succesfully  used  from    being    installed within a partition contained in an extended partition.

5. configuration tools 

You don’t want to edit configuration files by hand in most cases (especially for desktops). Hence, look for distros which offer a rich GUI-based means of configuring different system parameters. Yast in Suse Linux is a good example. The `Firstboot’ wizard in Fedora takes you through basic system configuration (such as adding a new non-administrative user, setting date/time preferences, etc.) at the first successful boot post-install. However, not all configuration can be done using a point-and-click interface in every case. For instance, if your graphics’ subsystem   itself cannot  be   recognized  and hence the X  server is failing to load, you will have to settle for tinkering  with the configuration files by hand or (if available) go for  a menu-driven interface to configuring the system.