Mageia 8 Release Notes


Contents

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 8, previously spent more than a year in development. It will be supported with security and bug fix updates for 18 months, up to October 2022.

Available installation media

Mageia has three distinct installation media types:

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 8 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:

The Nonfree media set is enabled by default but can be disabled, if necessary, during the installation.

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.

32 bit repos on 64 bit systems

Please note that on 64-bit systems, the 32-bit repositories are configured, but they are not enabled by default. They are needed by some packages, such as Steam. If you want to install such packages that have dependencies on packages from 32-bit repositories, please make sure that you have "Core 32bit Release" and "Core 32bit Updates" enabled. Likewise for some cases the 32 bit Nonfree or Tainted (both in Release and Updates flavors) may be needed. Basic rules: Don't enable 32-bit repos without corresponding 64 bit enabled because 64-bits libs are preferred (generally) on 64-bit system, and if once a 32-bit repo is used, keep both its Release and Updates flavour enabled to not potentially hinder updates.

Release highlights

Faster package metadata parsing

Urpmi metadata are compressed with Zstd instead of Xz, resulting in faster parsing.

Python2 is mostly dead

Most python2 modules & software were removed.

ARM support

The ARM (Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machine) port rebooted during Mageia 7 days has been enhanced. The core is available for ARMv7 and AArch64.

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 8's release.

Drakboot is now somewhat able to set up UEFI on AArch64.

Major developments

Installation

Stage 1

Stage 2

Rescue

The rescue system has been enhanced:

Live ISO

Hardware support

Localisation (l10n) / Internationalisation (i18n)

Manuals

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 4.16.1.2.

RPM 4.16 offers key improvements to RPM as a whole, including:

More information on changes from RPM 4.14 (which shipped with Mageia 7) to RPM 4.16 is available from the RPM website:

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 8 ships with DNF v4.6.0.

System upgrades using DNF are supported. See the section on upgrading with DNF in the release notes for more information.

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 8, 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/

perl-URPM and urpmi

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. The checking routine after writing operations is looking now for a sha3 sum file and corresponding signature.

The added persistence partition can now also be encrypted. This will be recognized only for Mageia 8 and later ISO images. See here for more information.

Docker

The Docker ecosystem has been augmented (based on the 19.03 version of the engine) with many additional tools such as docker-compose (orchestration with v3 support), containered (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 8, 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 GUI mode has been enhanced to include the summary stage from the classical installer, allowing easy configuration of locales, timezones, system services, and firewalls. The individual package selection stage now includes a flat list mode, removing the restrictions on what packages can be selected.

For more information, please refer to the wiki page: draklive2

PCMemTest

This is a fork and major rewrite of the Memtest86+ memory test utility. Unlike Memtest86+, PCMemTest can be used with UEFI as well as with legacy BIOS boot (with the limitation that with UEFI boot, keyboard input only works if the CSM is enabled in the BIOS). PCMemTest replaces Memtest86+ as the memory test utility on all the Mageia ISOs. It may also be installed in a user's system, where it will be automatically added to the system boot menu.

Base system

Kernel and hardware support

All hardware managed by this kernel version is enabled. The kernel provides better graphics with Mesa 20.3.4.

There were quite a few changes regarding this since 5.8 Kernel version. If using intel_pstate (for Sandy Bridge and newer Intel cpus), the default behaviour changed on CPUs without hardware-managed P-states (HWP) support, and you need to add the kernel parameter intel_pstate=active to restore previous behaviour if this results in worse performance for you. (See mga#27191).

Graphic drivers

Mesa has been updated to Mesa 20.3.4.

Graphical drivers now use the new vendor-neutral libGL implementation (colloquially "glvnd": GL Vendor Neutral Dispatch) which has been developed to address several issues with OpenGL support on modern Linux systems.

X Window System (X11)

Mageia 8 ships with X.Org 1.20.10.

AMD video drivers
NVIDIA drivers
Proprietary NVIDIA driver

NVIDIA's proprietary drivers are provided in the nonfree repositories:

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:

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

Desktop environments

All the desktop environments mentioned below are included in Mageia's online repositories, and can be installed in parallel on any Mageia 8 system. Some of them are also included on the physical media, LiveDVDs and Classical DVDs, as specified in each section.

Plasma

Plasma, the desktop environment from the KDE community, is provided as version 5.20.4, built on top of Qt 5.15.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.76 and with KDE Applications 20.12.0.

If you want to try Plasma under Wayland, install plasma-workspace-wayland, and it should appear in your favourite display manager's list of desktop environments at log in.

Note also that Wayland session with Nvidia's 455 (current) nonfree-drivers is available by making sure that "nokmsboot" is removed and "nouveau.modeset=0" is passed to Kernel command line. - This is provided as Technology Preview for testers.

The default display manager (DM) for the Plasma environment is the Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM).

If you have Compiz enabled in Mageia 7, disable it before upgrade, see Errata.

Plasma has a specific 64-bit LiveDVD and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

GNOME

GNOME 3.38.3 is provided. It now defaults to running on Wayland, but also provides an alternative "GNOME on Xorg" session. Note that with Nvidia's nonfree drivers, GNOME defaults to start an X11 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 4.16 is provided.

Xfce has dedicated 32-bit and 64-bit LiveDVDs and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

LXQt

LXQt 0.16.0 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. As transparency compositor in combination with openbox, picom replaces compton - may need manual adjustment.

MATE

MATE 1.24.2 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 advised to install task-mate package after initial installation.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon 4.8.3 is provided.

Cinnamon can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

Enlightenment

The Enlightenment task package comes with E24.2 and Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) 1.25.1 -- including the Elementary, Evas-generic-loaders and Evas-generic-players packages. Among the highlights of this version is Bluez5 support, an improved screenshot tool, a more flexible music control module, the Evisum system monitor, the now integrated Polkit-EFL authentication agent, and a separate configuration for applications to be loaded when restarting E. For more details on this version, see https://www.enlightenment.org/news/e24.2.

Of course, Mageia includes E's Econnman UI for the connman connection manager, along with 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 8 also offers a Mageia-branded theme as the default.

For those new or returning to E, startup applications and processes (such as the Mageia Online Applet for update notifications) are not automatically picked up from /etc/xdg/autostart, but are enabled at startup by going to Main menu > Settings > Apps > Startup Applications and adding the desired applications and system processes. Applications (only) to be loaded on restarting the DE are handled separately from a list available via Main menu > Settings > Apps > Restart Applications.

Enlightenment's system tray, which uses SNI appindicator notifications, is a separate module that must be loaded (Main menu > Settings > Modules) and added to a shelf (panel), where the Mageia Online Applet and Netapplet will be displayed (when enabled) along with others. Gtk applications with appindicators (e.g., Ubuntu indicator plugin for Pidgin) now have their icons correctly displayed as well.

Currently, there are two known issues. First, Mageia enables systemd-networkd to manage networking by default. Those who prefer to use connman with the Econnman interface may find it is not always functional (after disabling systemd-networkd and enabling connman.service), perhaps as a result of the default wpa_supplicant configuration. (There is a separate, recently-developed wireless gadget for managing multiple network backends that is not yet included in the Mageia repositories.) Second, restarting E sometimes results in a warning that the Efreet cache was not updated. In general, this can be ignored as it results from a time-out which still seems to be too short for some systems.

Light window managers

You can also keep your Mageia 8 installation even more lightweight, 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

IceWM is installed by default as a backup desktop environment even if you select Plasma or GNOME in the installer. It is also present in all Live ISOs.

To launch it you select "icewm-session" in the login menu of your display manager.

Office apps

LibreOffice has been updated to 7.0.4.2. See official release notes for details.

Internet apps

Iceape is dropped, because Seamonkey has not yet been ported to python 3. Note: You need to export content before upgrading Mageia! For some guiding see mga#26593#c14 and also search internet.

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

Games

In the Mageia community, our love for free software extends to open source games. A huge effort has been made during the Mageia 8 release cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 8 a very good platform for intensive and casual gamers alike. You can check the Mageia App DB to see a list of all the new and updated games in Mageia 8. The following section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game category.

Education

Mageia 8 comes with gcompris-qt 1.0 which 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

Glibc has been updated to 2.32. GCC has been updated to 10.2, GDB to 10.1 and Valgrind to 3.16.1. LLVM has been updated to 11.0.1.

Firebird has been updated to 3.0.7

IPython has been updated to 7.19.

Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions (long-term support when available), such as Qt 5.15.2 and GTK+ 3.24.24. GTK4is also provided at version 4.1.0 Tcl/Tk is at version 8.6.10.

Ocaml has been updated to 4.10

Java stack has been updated to 11, java 8 is still available but is not the default.

Mono has been updated to 6.10.

The MinGW stack has been updated.

Virtualization stack

QEmu has been updated to 5.2.

libvirt has been updated to 7.0, virt-manager to 3.2.0, libguestfs to 1.44.

Xen is at version 4.14.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is at version 6.1.18.

Note: In 6.1 series, VirtualBox only supports x86_64 hosts. An existing 32 bit host will be removed!

Language stacks

Python 3 has been updated to 3.8.7. Python 2 is being retired (most python2 modules have already been removed).

Perl has been updated to 5.32.1.

Ruby has been updated to 2.7.2.

Rust is at version 1.49.0. It will be updated during Mageia 8's support life to follow new developments.

PHP has been updated to 8.0.2, which gives a further performance improvement.

Server applications

Nginx

New installation of nginx http server uses "apache" user: Web servers in Mageia are supposed to use the "apache" user created by the webserver-base package (which they then need to require). This package no longer use a "nginx" user, fixing mga#26183.

Nextcloud

At release Mageia 8 will have no Nextcloud server packaged, because version 21 - the first supporting PHP8 - is not released yet.

On the positive side we provide two paths:

Warning
Nextcloud prior to version 21 will not work on Mageia 8 because we drop PHP7.


Mageia 7 came with Nextcloud 15 in core release repository. The Nextcloud installation must not skip a major version! Therefore *before* upgrading to Mageia 8, you have to update Nextcloud first to version 16, then to 17, then to 18, then to 19, then to 20. You find these versions in Mageia 7 backports repository. For each update also make sure you have apps updated (they are updated by using Nextcloud interface) and some are better disabled or uninstalled before each update, then enabled after each, and also verify Nextcloud including all apps works after each update, check logs. Before starting the process it is a very good idea to take backups. Also, see evolving instructions at Nextcloud.

Upgrading from Mageia 7

Upgrading from Mageia 7 is supported, and has been fine-tuned over the past few months.

Please note!
Please also read the Mageia 8 errata chapter "Upgrade issues".


Preparations

rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}-%{version}-%{RELEASE}-%{ARCH}\n" |grep i586 |grep devel

Not supported

- In these cases, you have to do a fresh installation. (possibly keeping the /home directory)

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/dnf system-upgrade). Each method is outlined below.

Fully update your system and check you have enough free space before starting the upgrade. At least 2 GB, depending on your configuration - see Note and safe method at Upgrading online, using urpmi (CLI) below.

Please note!
Use a wired internet connection if possible, especially when you're using nonfree wlan drivers.


Upgrading online, using mgaonline (GUI)

  1. Ensure any screen lockers have been disabled.
  2. Use Mageia Online icon in the system tray to start the upgrade.

- If it does not offer the upgrade:

After a reboot, the blue upgrade icon should appear when Mageia Online next checks for updates. - If Mageia 7 has reached EOL, it will be orange and show a pop-up warning that Mageia 7 is no longer supported.

Alternatively, you can launch the upgrade process by entering the following in a terminal:

Konsole.png
[user@computer ~]$ su -c 'mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=8'


It will notify you of the availability of the new Mageia 8 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.

If you have dnf installed, you will have to stop the dnf makecache timer, because it causes a crash of urpmi when run during the upgrade. The commands are included below. See mga#25072.

Run-level 3 can be enabled by appending "3" to the kernel command line by editing it at boot and to get then a login prompt. Other option is to use the command: systemctl isolate multi-user.target

It is recommended to run "script upgrade_log.txt" before launching the next commands to capture the upgrade messages just in case a failure occurs. The messages will be written in upgrade_log.txt file. Use "exit" to quit out of "script".

Here are the general upgrade steps:

Konsole.png
[user@computer ~]$/bin/su -
password:
[root@computer ~]# _
Warning
From this point all the commands are executed as root
urpmi --auto-update --auto --force
systemctl stop dnf-makecache.service
systemctl stop dnf-makecache.timer && systemctl daemon-reload
urpmi.removemedia -a
urpmi --auto-update --auto --force
Please note!

It is often a good idea, when you have more than enough free disk space, to test the upgrade before carrying it out.
With this command: urpmi --auto-update --auto --force --download-all --test all the packages are downloaded and the 'upgrade' is only a simulation. This needs a lot of free space before starting the test - like more than 2GB free space on /var partition ( / of you have no /var). (If you have several large desktops and many programs you may need more - if only a lightweight desktop, less.) If you have space on another partition, you can specify the destination of downloaded files by adding a path pointing to this partition after the --download-all keyword.
If the result is good, then upgrade for real with the command urpmi --auto-update --auto --force --download-all (same but without --test). Add also the path of downloaded files if specified previously.

If the result is not good, restore the Mageia 7 repositories with urpmi.removemedia -a and urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist 'http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.7.$ARCH.list' like above, and clean the cache by issuing urpmi --clean .


Upgrading online, using DNF (CLI)

If you're using (or now change to use) DNF for software management (configured appropriately per our wiki page on using DNF), you can upgrade Mageia in just a few steps. Note all commands must be run as root.

  1. Ensure you're fully up to date: dnf --refresh upgrade
  2. Install the system-upgrade plugin: dnf install 'dnf-command(system-upgrade)'
  3. Start it: dnf system-upgrade --releasever 8 download --allowerasing.
    1. It will ask before downloading packages, and tell how much space is required. If you do not have what it says plus a couple of hundred MB free space on /var partition (if /var is not separate but part of / partition, add another couple hundred MB), then either make enough space or add the option --downloaddir path_to_directory_with_free_space to this and the next system-upgrade commands. Also, if you have a separate /boot partition make sure it has space for adding two kernels. Also make sure / have additional room for the larger new programs.
    2. When you know all kinds of space is enough, say yes to let it download. It will also dry run a transaction test.
  4. If the downloading and transaction test succeeded,
    1. Save your work, and close applications!
    2. Trigger the upgrade: dnf system-upgrade reboot /!\ NOTE: This immediately reboots your system! /!\

Now enjoy some beverage while looking at the bubbles on our boot splash - and above it, messages what is happening. When done, it will reboot to let you enjoy your new Mageia.

Using the traditional Mageia 8 DVD to Upgrade

You can use the traditional (so, non-Live) Mageia 8 DVD to do clean installs, but also to upgrade from Mageia 7.

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 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 7 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 7 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.

Upgrading an encrypted install

Firstly, on the running Mageia 7 system:

Then prepare and boot the traditional installer as described above, and:

Known issues

User action needed

User actions needed that are not described elsewhere on this page nor in Errata.

VeraCrypt

After upgrade to Mageia 8, VeraCrypt does not work with sudo as before. mga#28001

Since veracrypt-1.24u2 you have to add the command line switch '--use-dummy-sudo-password' when starting VeraCrypt to get the old behaviour with sudo. See also Arch Linux forum.

Bugs

See the Errata page.

Bug reporting

We have a bug tracker. Before reporting any bugs, please read the Errata and also search the bug tracker to see if the issue is already reported. - If it is, then maybe you can add valuable information, or help testing a proposed update. To contribute, you need a Mageia account, which you can create at https://identity.mageia.org/. If you don't know, see how to report a bug.

You are also welcome to our Forum. For the development phase visit the section "Testing : Alpha, Beta, RC and Cauldron".

Packages removed from the distribution

Without removal on upgrade

The following packages have been removed from the distribution. They won't be affected by the upgrade process, they should continue to work, but won't receive any support anymore if they don't. Moreover, they won't receive any updates anymore, which means they are likely to get outdated from upstream versions first, and potentially get exposed to security issues second. You should probably switch to an upstream version, but that's your own decision.

The category contains the following packages:

With removal on upgrade

The following packages have been removed from the distribution and marked as obsolete in the task-obsolete package: they will be removed by the upgrade process.

The category contains the following packages, alphabetically: