Mageia has two distinct installation media types:
All ISO images can be burned to a DVD or dumped on a USB flash drive. But please note the size limitation as for example a 4GB ISO image can be to big for some 4GB USB drives due to rounding the size to GB.
For more information, please have a look at our installation media manual page.
You will find the different download options on the Mageia 6 download page: direct (FTP and HTTP) and BitTorrent downloads are available.
The Mageia software sits in three different repositories/media, depending on the type of license applied to each package. Here's an overview of those repositories:
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, as they are needed by some packages, such as Skype or PlayOnLinux.
The ARM port has been rebooted. See Feature:ARM_Port The core is available for armv5 & armv7, which includes Raspberry Pi. There's no traditional installer, it's for testers only.
The default boot loader (and also the only selectable bootloader during a fresh install) is now grub2 instead of grub due to grub legacy not supporting:
As such and as lilo & grub legacy are no more maintained, we offer only grub2 for new installations. For upgrades, we still offer grub legacy & lilo as they were previously installed & used and as the older filesystem do not use new metadata.
Grub2 integration with drakx tools has been enhanced. For example, it's possible to enable/disable os-prober (which can be quite slow when there's a lot of partitions and/or of foreign OSes).
On non UEFI machines (aka PC-BIOS), if the boot disk needs a GPT partition table, the installer will now create a BIOS boot partition
During upgrades, Grub2 will not yet replace an existing different bootloader.
For new Mageia 6 installation (without Mageia distro upgrade), if you want to use an other boot loader than grub2, like the windows boot loader, take a look at Retaining an existing third party bootloader and Using an existing bootloader.
If during installation of Mageia 6, you wish to avoid overwriting the MBR (PC-BIOS), and you have for example : a hard disk (name /dev/sda) , a USB key with Mageia 6 ISO DVD (name /dev/sdb) and an other USB key with FAT32 format (name /dev/sdc), a workaround is to install the grub2 bootloader on the USB key with FAT32 format (name /dev/sdc) at this step and when your computer start, boot on the usb key and load Mageia Linux kernel.
Support for Alpha/IA64/PPC/SPARC was dropped from the installer, but this is invisible to the users since Mageia never offered those architectures to install to.
For further details on UEFI installation please refer to the wiki page Installing on systems with UEFI firmware.
New translations have been added, while others were improved. Thanks to our dedicated community of translators for their reliable work.
Due to migration to qt5 for Mageia 6, changes has been made in localedrake to install qt5 plugin for input method platform if user's desktop is plasma 5. However, sometimes manual installation is still required:
Gnome now uses wayland by default, therefore only ibus is supported input method platform.
RPM has been upgraded to 4.13.0.1. See http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.13.0.1 for details.
DNF has been introduced as an alternative to urpmi in Mageia 6.
For information on how to use it, please refer to the wiki page Using DNF.
PackageKit has been upgraded and switched to a new backend that dramatically improves the reliability and usability of PackageKit-based frontends, such as Apper (Plasma Desktop) and GNOME Software (GNOME).
The new PackageKit backend is completely independent from urpmi and can be managed through PackageKit frontends like Apper or through DNF (which shares repository configuration settings with it).
Urpmi tracks better package errors thanks to new rpm-4.13.
It now prefers http mirrors when using a mirrorlist, this avoids selecting an rsync mirror which prevents aria2 from being used.
Various bug fixes have landed.
MCC has been ported from gtk+2 to gtk+3. MCC's help has been ported from WebKit1 to WebKit2.
Isodumper, a tool to write ISO images on memory devices, comes with a new graphical interface, using libyui. Thus Isodumper uses either GTK or Qt as graphical library. You have to choose which one you want to use, either isodumper-gtk or isodumper-qt. Isodumper comes also with a ncurses interface which can be used even if no X session is available. In case of upgrading, only the ncurses version will be available, you have to complete the installation.
All hardware managed by this kernel version is enabled. It also provides better graphics with Mesa 17.1, which brings among others increased performance for intel hardware, and experimental reclocking in nouveau driver.
It has been ported to python3 & gtk+3.
Mageia 6 ships with X.Org 1.19.0.
The keyboard & mouse drivers have been obsoleted by the generic evdev driver. The evdev driver was used by default forever in Mageia: it has replaced the formers for quite a long time. We were still packaging the keyboard & mouse drivers as fallbacks for years but they're no more included in Mageia. That means if someone was still relying on specific entries using those obsolete drivers, those section should be removed (XFdrake didnn't write such sections since 2009).
The libinput driver is now default generic input instead of the evdev driver. The later is still packaged in case someones needs it.
The libinput also replaces the synaptics driver. As such the synaptics driver is no more automatically installed when there's a touchpad.
Plasma 5.8 is provided. It now replaces the KDE desktop, which is not maintained upstream anymore. Almost all KDE4 applications were ported to Plasma, so you will get a nice experience.
It has a specific Live-DVD or can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).
If you want to try Plasma under Wayland, just install plasma-workspace-wayland and it should appear in your favorite Display Manager choices.
GNOME 3.22 is provided.
It has a specific Live-DVD or can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).
For those prefering good old GNOME2, GNOME3 also provides a "Gnome Classic" session.
The very lightweight Gtk2 based desktop is still there, it can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).
It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer), as in Mageia 5 and before. Additionally, it can now be installed from our Xfce LiveDVD isos (i586 and x86_64)
LXQt is the successor of RazorQt. Upgrading from Mageia 5 to Mageia 6 will replace RazorQt with LXQt.
It cannot be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer) as there is simply not enough space to include all desktop environments and the packages they depend upon.
Online media need to be added to enable selection during initial installation - this is explained in installer documentation
MATE 1.18.0 is provided. Mate Desktop is now GTK+3 due to upstream decision and completely ported to GTK+3.
It can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (Traditional installer). Due to DVD space capabilities some applications like mate-screenshot (screenshot application) aren't included in Classical DVD ISO. For a full MATE Desktop experience users are suggested to install task-mate package after initial installation.
It can be installed from the DVD ISO (Traditional installer).
The Enlightenment task package comes with the latest versions of E21 and Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). EFL now 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, the Enlightenment authentication agent, and the EFL-based Terminology advanced terminal emulator and Ephoto image viewer -- and will soon include a set of updated desktop themes, as well.
Mageia 6 also provides a plethora of small and efficient window managers such as afterstep, awesome, dwm, fluxbox, fvwm2, fvwm-crystal, i3, icewm, jwm, lightdm, matchbox, openbox, pekwm, sugar, swm, windowmaker.
We now have icewm and icewm-session in the login menu of your display manager.
Beginning with IceWM 1.2.13 there is a binary icewm-session. This binary helps you to handle all IceWM subparts (icewmbg, icewm, icewmtray, startup, shutdown started in this order). Therefore you can use icewm-session to start IceWM, icewm now starts only the window manager itself.
LibreOffice has been updated to 5.3. See official release notes for details.
Now that the last patent has expired on April 2017, mp3 encoding is available in core medias. Tainted medias are still needed for h264 and aac encoding.
Video editor Kdenlive now brings Movit GPU accelerated effects if you have OpenGL 3 compliant hardware.
Mixxx 2.0 which was also backported to Mageia 5 has getted professionnal, with a very good realtime music database handling, beat and note detection and AutoDJ mode.
Vim has the "persistent undo" feature enabled by default, now, which is the new upstream default. "Persistent undo" enables undoing even if the file was saved many times, by storing all changes in .<filename>.un~ files.
If you prefer the old default behaviour, then add the following to your ~/.vimrc :
set noundofile set backup
In the Mageia community, our love for free software extends to open source games. A huge effort has been made during the Mageia 6 release cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 6 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 6. The following section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game category.
The following list is non-exhaustive.
Emilia, the only open-source pinball brings 3 new tables for the first time in twelve years!
The following list is non-exhaustive.
Mageia comes with a set of nice gaming platforms and tools, among which:
Mageia 6 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.
GCC has been updated to 5.4.0, GDB to 7.12 and Valgrind to 3.12.0. LLVM has been updated to 3.9.1. LLDB is now packaged as well.
Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions, such as Qt 5.6.2 and GTK+ 3.22.15. An important work has been done to simplify the Java stack which was hard to maintain in Mageia 5.
Python3 has been updated to 3.5.3, Python to 2.7.13, and when possible, all Python modules are provided for Python 2 and Python 3.
Perl has been updated to 5.22.3.
libvirt and virt-manager now support UEFI in VMs (one needs to install edk2-ovmf-x64).
Firebird has been updated to 3.0.1.
IPython has been updated to 5.0 (LTS version).
Ruby has been updated to 2.2.5p319
Tcl/Tk is at version 8.6.5
One of the major steps done for this release, Mageia 6 brings KDE Frameworks 5 version 5.32.
Nextcloud 11 replaces ownCloud. This is both migration and several steps of upgrade. This software have limited ability to skip intermediate versions, so some iterative installs from MGA5 backports must be done *BEFORE* upgrading Mageia. See OwnCloud#Upgrading for details.
Please also read the known issues page, chapter "Upgrade Issues".
Upgrading from Mageia 5 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 5 (such as rpm and urpmi). Upgrading directly from Mageia 4 or another distribution is not supported.
If you want to upgrade a 64 bit system, it may contain 32 bit software, it is not a problem provided it does not include development libraries, you can identify them at the word "devel" into their name. To know if your system houses such libraries you can use the commands:
and you must un-install these libraries before upgrading.
If 3rd party repositories, such as Google, have been added during the use of Mageia 5, be sure to make a backup/copy of /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg.
If you have an ownCloud server or client on Mageia 5, do check OwnCloud#Upgrading before upgrading to Mageia 6!
There are several ways to upgrade from Mageia 5:
Warning: Upgrading an existing install using a Live support 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 6, you have to do a complete installation. Direct upgrade is not supported.
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 of your configuration) before starting upgrade.
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. http://doc.mageia.org/mcc/6/en/content/MageiaUpdate.html
2. In Mageia Control Centre - Software Management - Configure Updates Frequency, make sure that the option "Check for newer default releases" is selected. http://doc.mageia.org/mcc/6/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 re-boot, the blue upgrade icon should appear when Mageia Online next checks for updates.
Alternatively, you can launch the upgrade process by entering in a terminal:
It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 6 distribution, configure Mageia media sources and start migration.
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 wise 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:
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.
You can use the traditional (so non-Live) Mageia 6 DVD to do clean installs but also to upgrade from Mageia 5.
To upgrade:
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 32bits packages in an otherwise 64bits install, because the 64bits iso will only contain the 64bits packages, so the upgrade is likely to fail if you do not add online repositories.
Moreover, it is possible that Mageia 5 may have received an update to a later version of software than that available on the ISO. When this happens, the upgrade may fail to complete. Since, at the time the ISOs are tested, it is impossible to anticipate which Mageia 5 packages may be updated in the future, 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.
See the Errata page.
If samba server fail to start after upgrading to Mageia 6 you may change
security=share to security=user in /etc/samba/smb.conf and restart the samba service.
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.
