[Cialug] Mageia / Mandriva

[David Champion]

Some Mageia / Mandriva news.

Mageia has released version 2 yesterday. I have not tried it yet, but I've
been running Mageia 1 on a couple of machines, and it has been working
quite well. Mageia is the open-source fork of Mandriva, formed in part by
former Mandriva employees after the parent company had financial issues and
let them go.

http://blog.mageia.org/en/

Mandriva corp. has now announced that they are releasing control of the
Linux distribution to a community led group. Not sure what will happen with
this...

http://blog.mandriva.com/en/2012/05/17/mandriva-linux-will-return-to-the-community/

Mageia has declined to join the new Mandriva community group (they explain
on their blog).

If you haven't tried either of these - they are RedHat derived and
rpm-based, but with significant work to make it more user-friendly, and has
some nice performance tweaks for both server and workstation. I don't know
that I'd use either of them in a commercial environment, but I do like them
for my own personal use. The underlying OS and config files are similar
enough that anyone familiar with RH / CentOS / Fedora would feel at home.
Just replace the "yum" rpm front end with "urpmi" and you're good to go.
The gui configuration tools are quite good.

-dc