Mageia 7 Release Notes
Contents
* 1 Introduction
+ 1.1 Available installation media
+ 1.2 The Mageia online repositories
* 2 Release highlights
+ 2.1 ARM support
* 3 Major developments
+ 3.1 Installation
o 3.1.1 Stage 1
o 3.1.2 Stage 2
o 3.1.3 Hardware support
+ 3.2 Localisation (l10n) / Internationalisation (i18n)
o 3.2.1 Manuals
o 3.2.2 Software translations
+ 3.3 Package management
o 3.3.1 New RPM
o 3.3.2 DNF: the alternative package manager
o 3.3.3 AppStream
o 3.3.4 Zchunk
o 3.3.5 perl-URPM and urpmi
+ 3.4 Tools
o 3.4.1 Mageia Control Center
o 3.4.2 Other
# 3.4.2.1 MageiaWelcome
# 3.4.2.2 Isodumper
# 3.4.2.3 Docker
# 3.4.2.4 LiveCD Tools
# 3.4.2.5 draklive2
+ 3.5 Base system
o 3.5.1 Kernel and hardware support
o 3.5.2 X Window System (X11)
o 3.5.3 AMD video drivers
o 3.5.4 NVIDIA drivers
# 3.5.4.1 Optimus laptops
o 3.5.5 Bootloaders
+ 3.6 Desktop environments
o 3.6.1 Plasma
o 3.6.2 GNOME
o 3.6.3 LXDE
o 3.6.4 Xfce
o 3.6.5 LXQt
o 3.6.6 MATE
o 3.6.7 Cinnamon
o 3.6.8 Enlightenment
o 3.6.9 Light window managers
# 3.6.9.1 IceWM
+ 3.7 Office apps
+ 3.8 Multimedia apps
+ 3.9 Editors
+ 3.10 Games
+ 3.11 Education
+ 3.12 Software Development
o 3.12.1 Compilers and tools
o 3.12.2 Virtualization stack
o 3.12.3 Language stacks
+ 3.13 Miscellaneous
* 4 Upgrading from Mageia 6
+ 4.1 Upgrading via the Internet
o 4.1.1 Upgrading online, using mgaonline (GUI)
o 4.1.2 Upgrading online, using urpmi (CLI)
+ 4.2 Using the traditional Mageia 7 DVD to Upgrade
* 5 Known issues
+ 5.1 Obsoleted packages
+ 5.2 Bug reporting
+ 5.3 Device names changed for MMC devices
+ 5.4 GNOME on Wayland and su -
Introduction
Mageia is a Free Software operating system of the GNU/Linux family,
which can be installed on computers either as the main operating
system, or as an alternative system to one or several pre-installed
systems (dual boot). It is a community project supported by the
non-profit Mageia.Org organization of elected contributors. Mageia is
developed by and for its community of users, and is suitable for all
kinds of users, from first-time GNU/Linux users to advanced developers
or system administrators.
The latest stable release of the Mageia project, Mageia 7 was developed
for over one year before. It will be supported with security and bug
fix updates for 18 months, up to XX XXXXXry 2020.
Available installation media
Mageia has two distinct installation media types:
* Classical ISOs (DVD 32-bit, DVD 64-bit), which use the DrakX
traditional installer. The 32-bit and 64-bit DVD ISOs contain all
supported locales, a great variety of packages to choose from
(including most supported desktop environments) and all non-free
drivers. The use of non-free packages can be disabled during the
installation.
* Live ISOs, which can be used to preview the distribution, are an
installation alternative to place Mageia on your hard drive. Live
media come with either the Plasma (64-bit), GNOME (64-bit) or Xfce
(32 or 64-bit) desktop environments. The Live DVDs contain all
supported locales and a preselection of software, making them a
quicker way to get started working with Mageia. Note that we added
a persistence feature which allows creation of a partition on a USB
stick to store customization of the system which survives after a
reboot.
All ISO images can be burned to a DVD or dumped on a USB flash drive.
Please note the file and device size limits as, for example, a 4 GB ISO
image can be too big for some "nominally" 4 GB USB drives, due to their
actual capacity being slightly lower than the marketed size.
For more information, please have a look at our installation media
manual page.
You will find the different download options on the Mageia 7 download
page: direct (FTP and HTTP) and BitTorrent downloads are available.
The Mageia online repositories
The software packages that are included in Mageia sit in three
different repositories/media, depending on the type of license applied
to each package. Here's an overview of those repositories:
* Core: The Core repository includes packages with
free-and-open-source software, i.e., packages licensed under a
free-and-open-source license. The set of the "Core" media along
with "Core Release" and "Core Updates" are enabled by default.
* Nonfree: The Nonfree repository includes packages that are
free-of-charge and free to redistribute, but that contain
closed-source software (hence the name - Nonfree). For example,
this repository includes NVIDIA and AMD/ATI proprietary graphics
card drivers, firmware for various WiFi cards, etc.
The Nonfree media set is enabled by default but can be disabled, if
necessary, during the installation.
* Tainted: The Tainted repository includes packages released under a
free license. The main criterion for placing packages in this
repository is that they may infringe on patents and copyright laws
in some countries, e.g., multimedia codecs needed to play various
audio/video files; packages needed to play a commercial video DVD,
etc.
The Tainted media set is added by default but not enabled by default,
i.e., it's completely opt-in; so, check your local laws before using
packages from this repository.
Please also note that on a 64-bit system, the 32-bit repositories are
also added. If the Nonfree or Tainted 64-bit repositories are enabled,
the corresponding 32-bit repositories should also be enabled (both in
Release and Updates flavors), as they are needed by some packages, such
as PlayOnLinux or Steam.
Release highlights
ARM support
The ARM (Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machine)
port rebooted during Mageia 6 days has been enhanced. The core is
available for ARMv7 and aarch64. Support for ARMv5 has been dropped.
There is no traditional installer for now, and it is still considered
experimental, but most of the distribution was built successfully on
both architectures (see our ARM status overview for details). The plan
is to provide installation images for popular ARM devices in the coming
months. There is no ETA for those as of Mageia 7's release.
Major developments
Installation
Stage 1
* Hardware support was extended to be able to start the installer on
very recent computers
* NFS support is done using system tools rather than our 15 years old
forked NFS code, thus gaining support for NFSv4 & co...
* Can install from a hard disk formatted in any supported fs rather
than just btrfs, ext[2-4], ISO9660, JFS, ntfs, reiserfs, vfat & XFS
* Added support for automatic installation off hard disk, either from
ISO or from a distrib tree. Eg:
automatic=method:disk,disk:vdb,partition:vdb1,dir:/Mageia/
Mga6.iso
Stage 2
* Lots of bug fixes and improvements in the partitioner
Hardware support
* New architectures:
+ ARM v5 support has been dropped
+ ARM v7 support has been enhanced.
+ Aarch64 support is added.
Localisation (l10n) / Internationalisation (i18n)
Manuals
* The manuals for the traditional installer and for the Mageia
Control Center have been (partially) translated into many more
languages. See our official documentation
* An English screenshot is used when a localized screenshot is
unavailable for an HTML manual.
* PDF and EPUB manuals are created only when more than half of the
needed localized screenshots for those manuals are available.
Software translations
New translations have been added, while others were improved. Thank you
to our dedicated community of translators for your reliable work.
Package management
New RPM
RPM has been upgraded to version 4.14.2.1.
RPM 4.14 offers key improvements to RPM as a whole, including:
* Major revamp of debuginfo packages
* Major rewrite of package/header reading and signature checking to
utilize a single codepath
* New SHA256 digests in packages: one for compressed payload alone
and one for the header
* Weak dependencies are taken into account when ordering
* Support for a configurable mode to conserve SSD disks
* Support for zstd compression
More information on changes from RPM 4.13 (which shipped with Mageia 6)
to RPM 4.14.2.1 is available from the RPM website:
* RPM 4.14: http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.14.0
* RPM 4.14.1: http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.14.1
* RPM 4.14.2: http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.14.2
* RPM 4.14.2.1: http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.14.2.1
DNF: the alternative package manager
DNF (Dandified Yum) was introduced as an alternative to urpmi since
Mageia 6.
DNF is a next-generation dependency resolver and high-level package
management tool that traces its ancestry to two projects: Fedora's YUM
(Yellowdog Updater, Modified) and openSUSE's SAT Solver (libsolv). DNF
was forked from YUM several years ago in order to rewrite it to use the
SAT Solver library from openSUSE and to massively restructure the
codebase so that a sane API would be available for both extending DNF
(via plugins and hooks) and building applications on top of it (such as
graphical frontends and system lifecycle automation frameworks).
DNF comes with enhanced problem reporting, advanced tracking of weak
dependencies, support for rich dependencies (see the RPM release notes
for more on this), and more detailed transaction information while
performing actions.
Mageia 7 ships with DNF v4.2.6. This version improves DNF over version
2.x in Mageia 6 by rewriting most of the logic from Python to C++ and
moving it to the libdnf library for performance.
This new version of DNF will now use repository metadata compressed
with zchunk when available. Zchunk is a new compression format designed
to allow for highly efficient deltas. With repositories compressed with
zchunk, DNF will now download only the differences between any earlier
copies of the metadata and the current version, allowing for
considerable bandwidth savings on regular metadata refreshes. See the
zchunk section in the release notes for more information.
It also introduces support for modules, though Mageia is not currently
publishing any modules in its repositories.
More information on modularity: https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/
DNF release notes:
https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/release_notes.html
With fresh installations via the classical and live media, DNF will be
installed in parallel with urpmi. Depending on the method used to
upgrade to Mageia 7, it may be necessary to install the dnf package to
have it available.
For information on how to use DNF, please refer to the wiki page: Using
DNF.
AppStream
Our RPM-MD (RPM MetaData) repositories (used by DNF and PackageKit)
provide AppStream metadata. Tools like GNOME Software (GNOME Desktop,
packaged as gnome-software) and Plasma Discover (KDE Plasma Desktop,
packaged as discover) leverage AppStream metadata to provide a rich
experience when searching, identifying, and managing applications.
AppStream is a cross-distribution effort for enhancing software
repositories by standardizing software component metadata. It enables
an application-centric view on package repositories and provides
specifications for things needed to create user-friendly application
centers.
See the AppStream website for more information:
https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Distributions/AppStream/
Zchunk
Our RPM-MD (RPM MetaData) repository metadata (used by DNF and
PackageKit) is compressed using the zchunk format in addition to the
gzip format used previously.
zchunk is a new compression format designed to allow for highly
efficient deltas. When Mageia's metadata is compressed using zchunk,
DNF will download only the differences between any earlier copies of
the metadata and the current version. DNF and related tools will see
significant reductions in the size of the metadata they download,
especially if they are run on a regular basis.
Zchunk repository metadata is only supported with the DNF package
manager and applications using it, such as dnfdragora, gnome-software,
and discover.
For more information about zchunk, see the following articles:
* Introducing zchunk -
https://www.jdieter.net/posts/2018/04/30/introducing-zchunk/
* What is zchunk? -
https://www.jdieter.net/posts/2018/05/31/what-is-zchunk/
perl-URPM and urpmi
* Doc has been enhanced (eg: URPM & urpm & CPAN)
* urpmi/perl-URPM support a wider range of rpm versions, from
rpm-4.11 to latest 4.14
* Various bug fixes have been made.
* perl-URPM use native 64bit integers instead of Math::Int64
Tools
Mageia Control Center
Other
MageiaWelcome
The 'Welcome' screen is an application that is presented to users when
booting into a fresh installation of Mageia. It has now been entirely
reworked to have a linear approach, with successive steps following in
a logical order of important things to know and do post-installation.
By default, it will run at each subsequent boot, but this behaviour is
optional. Even if the auto-run option is disabled - it can be invoked
at any time as an application (mageiawelcome).
Under the hood, it uses Python and QML. It is now resizeable and will
use the fonts of the desktop environment.
Isodumper
Isodumper is a tool to write ISO images on memory devices. It now uses
an improved checking routine after writing operations by looking for a
sha512 sum file and corresponding signature. If the sum is found, the
application compares the computed sum to the stored one, and
additionally indicates if the sum is signed. Another modification is
that the application no longer runs with root privileges, but as a
user's application - root privileges are requested only when needed
(for writing or formatting operations). This should improve the
security level.
We also added a feature in relation to Live images: By ticking a
check-box, any remaining space on the device can be designated as a
persistence partition. See here for more information.
Docker
The Docker ecosystem has been augmented (based on the 18.09 version of
the engine) with many additional tools such as docker-compose
(orchestration with v3 support), containerd (daemon controlling runC),
docker-registry (share of images), docker-machine (install docker on a
remote system), and python-docker (python 2 and 3 libraries for engine
API management).
LiveCD Tools
With Mageia 7, the LiveCD Tools have been rebased to the latest version
(v27.0).
For information on how to use the LiveCD Tools, please refer to the
wiki page: Using the LiveCD Tools
draklive2
The tool used to build the distribution Live ISOs has been revised to
make it easier to use. Several examples are provided to help users
build their own customised variants of the Live ISOs. There is now a
GUI mode, based on the Mageia classical installer, to support package
and locale selection.
For more information, please refer to the wiki page: draklive2
Base system
Kernel and hardware support
* Mageia 7 ships with kernel 5.1.
All hardware managed by this kernel version is enabled. The kernel
provides better graphics with Mesa 19.1.
* Other kernel flavors are included, particularly, kernel-linus (a
vanilla stock kernel without any extra patchset). See the wiki page
Kernel_flavours for more information.
X Window System (X11)
Mageia 7 ships with X.Org 1.20.4.
AMD video drivers
* Mageia 7 uses the free video drivers for AMD/ATI graphics cards,
AMDGPU for newer cards and Radeon for older graphics cards. The
free drivers also use the current Mesa 19.0, provided with Mageia
7. Compared with Mageia 6, hardware support has been increased and
performance has been improved.
* The proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver currently only works with X.org
1.1xx, so it cannot be used in Mageia 7.
* In case of a hybrid card, the solution exposed with the nouveau
driver and the precommand DRI_PRIME=n is also working, at least
with the radeon driver.
NVIDIA drivers
* The current libre Nouveau drivers are provided. Their performance
was greatly improved during Mageia's release cycle, and they might
satisfy most owners of Nvidia hardware for casual usage.
* The packages for the latest NVIDIA (long-lived branch, R430 at the
time of writing) proprietary drivers are provided in the nonfree
media repositories. CUDA 10.1.168 is also included in the same
nonfree repositories and can be used out of the box after
proprietary drivers are correctly configured.
* For older graphics cards, the proprietary NVIDIA drivers of the 340
and 390 branches are also still provided (390 being supported on
x86_64 only).
Optimus laptops
Owners of NVIDIA Optimus laptops (integrated Intel graphics processor
and discrete NVIDIA GPU) now have three ways to benefit from the power
of their discrete GPU:
* The free Nouveau drivers support Prime GPU offloading out of the
box, which can be used via the DRI_PRIME=1 environment variable
(unless the proprietary NVIDIA driver is in use by, e.g.,
mageia-prime). Refer to the Nouveau documentation to see how to
configure Xorg to use NVIDIA Prime with DRI3.
* As in Mageia 6, the Bumblebee package can be used to bridge the
monitor to the NVIDIA GPU, allowing to access its processing power
albeit with some overhead.
* A new experimental tool named mageia-prime can be used to configure
the NVIDIA Prime supported by recent Linux kernels and Xorg
servers. It allows to fully switch to using the NVIDIA GPU without
the overhead of Bumblebee, and is particularly suited for use with
CUDA.
In all three cases, when configuring the graphics drivers, one must
only configure the Intel card (at least in most Optimus
configurations), as it is typically the only one physically connected
to a monitor.
Bootloaders
* For UEFI boot, the rEFInd boot manager is now supported as an
alternative to GRUB2.
Desktop environments
All the desktop environments mentioned below are included in Mageia's
online repositories, and can be installed in parallel on any Mageia 7
system. Some of them are also included on the physical media, LiveDVDs
and Classical DVDs, as specified in each section.
Plasma
Plasma, the new desktop environment of the KDE community, is provided
in version 5.15.
If you want to try Plasma under Wayland, just install
plasma-workspace-wayland, and it should appear in your favorite display
manager's list of desktop environments.
The default display manager (DM) for the Plasma environment is SDDM,
and replaces the now obsolete KDM.
Plasma has a specific 64-bit LiveDVD and it can also be installed from
the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
GNOME
GNOME 3.32 is provided. It now defaults to running on Wayland, but also
provides an alternative "GNOME on Xorg" session.
For those preferring the GNOME 2 look and feel, GNOME 3 also provides a
"Gnome Classic" session.
GNOME has a specific 64-bit LiveDVD and it can also be installed from
the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
LXDE
The very lightweight GTK+2-based desktop environment is still available
and continues to receive improvements from upstream and our Mageia
maintainer, even though its community has partly refocused on LXQt.
LXDE can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional
installer).
Xfce
Xfce 4.13 is provided. It uses GTK+3 instead of GTK+2 as with Xfce
4.12. If version 4.14 becomes available in the lifecycle of Mageia 7,
it will be updated to 4.14.
Xfce has dedicated 32-bit and 64-bit LiveDVDs and it can also be
installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).
LXQt
LXQt 0.14.1 is provided.
LXQt cannot be installed out of the box from the Classical DVD ISO
(traditional installer) due to space constraints on the ISOs. Online
media need to be added to enable more options during the initial
installation - this is explained in the installer documentation.
MATE
MATE 1.22.0 is provided.
MATE can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional
installer). Due to DVD space considerations, some applications such as
mate-screenshot (screenshot application) are not included in Classical
DVD ISO. For a full MATE Desktop experience, users are suggested to
install task-mate package after initial installation.
Cinnamon
Cinnamon 4.0 is provided.
Cinnamon can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional
installer).
Enlightenment
The Enlightenment task package comes with E22.4 and Enlightenment
Foundation Libraries (EFL), which includes the previously separate
Elementary, Evas-generic-loaders and Evas-generic-players packages.
Also included are the connman connection manager for use with the E's
Econnman UI, E's Polkit-EFL authentication agent, and three EFL-based
applications: the Terminology advanced terminal emulator, the nimble
Ephoto image viewer, and the light-weight Rage video player. As with
the prior release, Mageia 7 also offers a Mageia-branded theme as the
default.
As always, E does not automatically include the startup applications
from /etc/xdg/autostart. After installation, go to Main menu > Settings
> Startup Applications and add needed system processes (e.g., a policy
kit authentication agent) and desired applications to be started on
boot up. If your installation includes the ICE windows manager, you may
choose between the MATE authentication agent that comes with it and
Polkit-EFL.
Beginning with E20, Enlightenment's system tray converted from Xembed
notifications with SNI appindicator notifications, which is not yet
supported by all applications (e.g., Parcellite clipboard manager),
while others use plugins (e.g, Pidgin, which has an Ubuntu indicator
plugin in the Mageia package to enable systray notifications).
As of the Beta releases there are three known issues. First, for
systems with optical drives, the Enlightenment File Manager (EFM) does
not mount them even though disks with and without data can be seen with
other file managers. Second, Mageia enables systemd-networkd to manage
networking by default. Those who prefer to use connman with the
Econnman interface will find it is not always functional (after
disabling systemd-networkd and enabling connman), probably as a result
of the default wpa_supplicant configuration. (There is a separate,
recently-developed wireless gadget for managing multiple backends that
is not yet included in the Mageia repositories.) Third, the E17 themes
still in the repository do not work with E22. Updated Mageia-branded
themes may be packaged in the near future. Additional themes may also
be found at https://www.enlightenment-themes.org/.
Light window managers
You can also keep your Mageia 7 installation very light and we provide
for this a plethora of small and efficient window managers. You can
find afterstep, awesome, dwm, fluxbox, fvwm2, fvwm-crystal, i3, icewm,
jwm, matchbox, openbox, pekwm, sugar, swm, and windowmaker. After
installation, they appear in the login menu of your display manager.
IceWM
You will find now both "icewm" and "icewm-session" in the login menu of
your display manager.
Beginning with IceWM 1.2.13, there is a new binary named
"icewm-session". This binary helps you to handle all IceWM subparts
(icewmbg, icewm, icewmtray, startup, and shutdown, started in this
order). Therefore, you should use icewm-session to start a complete
IceWM session. Choosing "Icewm" will only start the window manager
itself.
Office apps
LibreOffice has been updated to 6.2.3.2. See official release notes for
details.
Multimedia apps
Since the last patent expired in April, 2017, mp3 encoding is now
available in the core media. Tainted media are still needed for H.264,
H.265/HEVC and AAC encoding.
Editors
* Vim has been updated to 8.1
* NeoVim 0.3.5 is also included
Games
In the Mageia community, our love for free software extends to open
source games. A huge effort has been made during the Mageia 7 release
cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 7 a very good platform
for intensive and casual gamers alike. You can check Mageia App DB to
see a list of all the new and updated games in Mageia 7. The following
section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game
category.
Education
Mageia 7 comes with both old and new versions of gcompris. The old is
based on the GTK+ toolkit and has more activities. The new uses Qt and
brings some new activities. We were [1] among the donors in February,
2015, to improve the graphical interface of this very important
project.
Software Development
Compilers and tools
GCC has been updated to 8.3.1, GDB to 8.2 and Valgrind to 3.15.0. LLVM
has been updated to 8.0.0.
Firebird has been updated to 3.0.4
IPython has been updated to 7.2.
Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions (long-term
support when available), such as Qt 5.12.2 and GTK+ 3.24.8. Tcl/Tk is
at version 8.6.9.
Virtualization stack
libvirt has been updated to 5.3, virt-manager to 2.1.
VirtualBox is at version 6.0.8
Xen is at version 4.12.
Language stacks
Python 3 has been updated to 3.7.3, Python 2 to 2.7.16, and when
possible, all Python modules are provided for Python 2 and Python 3.
Perl has been updated to 5.28.2. Perl modules are now installed either
in /usr/share/perl5 (pure perl modules) or /usr/lib(64)/perl5 (binary
modules), like Fedora does. Perl version is no more included in the
standard path. Perl now uses 64bit integer by default on 32bit.
Some important effort has been made to simplify the Java stack which
was hard to maintain in Mageia 6.
Ruby has been updated to 2.5.3.
Rust is at version 1.35.0. It will be updated during Mageia 7's support
life to follow new developments.
PHP has been updated from 5.6 to 7.3, which gives a performance
improvement of about 50%.
Miscellaneous
Upgrading from Mageia 6
Please note!
Please also read the known issues page, chapter "Upgrade Issues".
Upgrading from Mageia 6 is supported, and has been fine-tuned over the
past few months, so it should work. But, as always, it is very
advisable to back up any important data before upgrading and make sure
you have made all updates of Mageia 6 (such as rpm and urpmi).
Upgrading directly from Mageia 5 or another distribution is not
supported.
If you want to upgrade a 64-bit system, it may contain 32-bit software.
This is not a problem provided it does not include development
libraries. You can identify these by the word "devel" in the name. To
know if your system houses such libraries you can use the command:
rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{version}-%{RELEASE}-%{ARCH}\n"
|grep i586 |grep devel
You must un-install these libraries before upgrading.
If 3rd party repositories, such as Google, have been added during the
use of Mageia 6, be sure to make a backup/copy of /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg.
There are several ways to upgrade from Mageia 6:
Warning: Upgrading an existing install using any of the Live images is
NOT supported due to the Live image being copied "as is" to the target
system.
If you want to upgrade a previous Mageia installation which was NOT in
UEFI, towards an UEFI-mode Mageia 7, you have to do a complete
installation. Direct upgrade is not supported.
Upgrading via the Internet
The Mageia Update notification applet, Mageia Online, will notify you
that a new Mageia release is available, and ask if you wish to upgrade.
If you agree, the upgrade will be carried out from within your Mageia
installation without any further steps being necessary.
If you have disabled the applet or it is not automatically running for
some reason, you can upgrade manually either using the GUI (mgaonline)
or the CLI (urpmi). Both methods are outlined below.
Fully update your system and check you have enough free space (at least
2 GB, depending on your configuration) before starting the upgrade.
Please note!
Use a wired internet connection if possible, especially when you're
using nonfree wlan drivers
Upgrading online, using mgaonline (GUI)
If Mageia Online does not display a blue icon in the system tray
offering you the option to upgrade to the new Mageia release:
1. Make sure that your system is fully up-to-date by applying all
available updates.
https://doc.mageia.org/mcc/7/en/content/MageiaUpdate.html
2. In Mageia Control Center - Software Management - Configure Updates
Frequency, make sure that the option "Check for newer default releases"
is selected.
https://doc.mageia.org/mcc/7/en/content/mgaapplet-config.html
3. Look in your home folder for a hidden directory, /.MgaOnline. If
there is a file mgaonline in that directory, then delete that file.
After a reboot, the blue upgrade icon should appear when Mageia Online
next checks for updates.
If Mageia 6 has reached EOL, you will see an orange icon and a pop-up
warning that Mageia 6 is no longer supported.
Alternatively, you can launch the upgrade process by entering in a
terminal:
su
mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=7
It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 7
distribution, configure Mageia media sources and start the migration.
Upgrading online, using urpmi (CLI)
This method is useful when the root partition is encrypted as the
booted system is already decrypting the partition.
There are multiple ways of getting a Command Line Interface (CLI).
The best method for performing an upgrade is to use run-level 3 so that
the X server and graphical environment is not running.
Therefore, the upgrade should be cleaner using run-level 3 than using a
terminal application as fewer programs are running which could
potentially mess up the upgrade.
Run-level 3 can be enabled by appending "3" to the kernel command line
in grub's menu.lst file and then rebooting the system to get a login
prompt.
It is recommended to run "script upgrade_log.txt" to capture the
upgrade messages just in case a failure occurs. Use "exit" to quit out
of "script".
Here are the general upgrade steps:
* Remove all of the existing media sources on your system by
executing this command as root in terminal:
su
urpmi.removemedia -a
* Add the Mageia 7 online sources, either:
+ Using the MIRRORLIST method (which will select a mirror
automatically based on your geographical location):
su
urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist
'http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.7.$ARCH.list'
(urpmi knows what to substitute for $ARCH)
+ Using a specific media mirror:
su
urpmi.addmedia --distrib <mirror_url>
You can get the mirror_url using the Mageia mirrors web
application.
* Finally start upgrading:
su
urpmi --replacefiles --auto-update --auto
* It's best to run the above command twice because in the first run
some packages may be downloaded but not installed.
Please note!
It is sometimes a good idea to test the upgrade before carrying it on.
With this command: urpmi --replacefiles --auto-update --auto
--download-all --test all the packages are downloaded and the upgrade
simulated only.
If the result is good, then upgrade for real with the command urpmi
--replacefiles --auto-update --auto --download-all
Using the traditional Mageia 7 DVD to Upgrade
You can use the traditional (so, non-Live) Mageia 7 DVD to do clean
installs, but also to upgrade from Mageia 6.
To upgrade:
* Download the ISO from the Mageia download page and burn it on a
DVD, or dump it on a USB stick. For more details, have a look at
this Available installation media article.
* Boot the DVD and make sure it booted in the same mode (legacy/BIOS
or UEFI) as Mageia 6 was installed in.
* Select "Install Mageia 7" from the GRUB (the bootloader) menu.
* Select the upgrade option.
It is recommended that the online repositories be set up during the
upgrade as the DVD only includes a subset of the complete set of Mageia
online repositories. This is especially important if you use important
32-bit packages in an otherwise 64-bit install, because the 64-bit ISO
will only contain the 64-bit packages, so the upgrade is likely to fail
if you do not add online repositories.
Moreover, it is possible that a particular Mageia 6 installation may
have received an update to a later version of software than that
available on the ISO. When this happens, an upgrade may fail to
complete. At the time the ISOs are tested, it is impossible to
anticipate which Mageia 6 packages may be updated in the future, so
offline upgrades (i.e., upgrades attempted without setting up the
online repositories) are not supported.
On the first reboot, use the command 'urpmi --auto-update' to make sure
all packages were updated.
Known issues
See the Errata page.
Obsoleted packages
get-skype is now obsolete, as the classic Skype versions for Linux
ceased to be supported by Skype on 1 July 2017. There is a new
web-based Skype version which may be installed directly from the Skype
web site by selecting the rpm version here. Note that only 64-bit
systems are supported.
cvsps version 2, which was last updated over ten years ago, is now
obsolete. It was used by git-cvsimport from the git-cvs package. If you
are performing a one-shot import of a CVS repository, consider using
cvs-fast-export.
Bug reporting
We have a bug tracker, but please read the Errata before reporting any
bugs. If you don't already have a Mageia account, you can create one on
https://identity.mageia.org/. If you don't know, see how to report a
bug.
Device names changed for MMC devices
By default, Mageia uses UUIDs for block-devices. It is possible that
you deviated from the default and manually changed /etc/fstab to use
device names for MMC block-devices. If so, you will have to change this
from /dev/mmcblk0 to /dev/mmcblk1. This has changed in Linux kernel
4.14.
GNOME on Wayland and su -
Some drak commands previously invoked from a "su -" root terminal no
longer presents a user GUI interface, rather a ncurses interface. if
this occurs, exit the ncurses interface, exit the root terminal and
re-invoke as normal user terminal the drak command. a password popup
will occur requesting root password and after correct password is
entered, the expected GUI interface is presented.
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