The first Mageia alpha is available [LWN.net]

The Mageia project has announced the availability of the first alpha release of its Mandriva fork. By all indications, this release will be on the rough side; it seems to be, as much as anything, a celebration of the fact that the project's build and distribution systems are now up and running. "We know that this release may not impress you that much, nor will it bring anything revolutionary for the moment and this is not one of our goals yet; as we first plan to have a rock solid factory and system."

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The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 15, 2011 15:59 UTC (Tue) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] (2 responses)

Care to explain what Magaia is supposed to be?
The link doesn't help me neither. It talks about downloading ISO images etc.
Probably a new Linux distribution?
(Note: I'm not a native English speaker, so I might have missed the obvious.)

The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 15, 2011 16:08 UTC (Tue) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link]

It's a fork of the existing Mandriva distribution my some former Mandriva folks unhappy at the activities of its sponsoring company. The original announcement email is here.

The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 15, 2011 16:08 UTC (Tue) by danielpf (guest, #4723) [Link]

Mageia is a fork of the Mandriva Linux distribution.

The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 15, 2011 18:45 UTC (Tue) by orev (guest, #50902) [Link] (6 responses)

Can you please make it a policy to include a description of the project in the first or second sentence of the post? Randal Schwartz was complaining about this on FLOSS Weekly -- about how very few OSS projects seem to put in the little effort to say what the project does, either in an obvious place on the web site or in announcements about releases. The same would go for news outlets that report on them.

The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 15, 2011 18:47 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (5 responses)

"The Mageia project has announced the availability of the first alpha release of its Mandriva fork"

First sentence. What's unclear about that?

The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 15, 2011 18:49 UTC (Tue) by orev (guest, #50902) [Link] (1 responses)

The article has been updated since. And I'm also talking about all articles going forward.

The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 15, 2011 20:08 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

The article has not been updated - that is how I wrote it initially.

The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 16, 2011 6:26 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

What's unclear about that?

Someone new to Linux might not know what Mandriva is. Language? Database? An e-learning system for training mandrills? OK, the answer can be found with a simple web search as always, but adding two or three words to give this context would be friendly.

The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 16, 2011 9:28 UTC (Wed) by Priscus (guest, #72409) [Link]

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Mandrake was the Ubuntu of its time, before it was gutted by a combination of bad calendar (IPO while the dot-com bubble was bursting), stupid investors (who wanted Mandrake to spread itself into other activities like e-learning), Hearst Publishing (Mandrake the Magician wanted his name back, Mandrake had to pay them to shut up and change their name) and overall crappy management (Mandriva communication was the anti-Ubuntu: bad, bad, baaad).

Technically, they were a mix of Redhat and Debian (Redhat layout, but debian menu, the first RPM equivalent to apt and online repositories) with KDE and good administration tools that still allowed for old-school configuration. Good stuff, but their Q&A was not always up to snuff (the joke was a good release followed by a crappy one).

Good luck to them, they did much for early Linux useability, and the distribution remains a cut above most of the crowd. I've been using them since the 5.2 days, and all my forays into other distributions have been disappointing.

The first Mageia alpha is available

Posted Feb 16, 2011 13:35 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

"Someone new to Linux might not know what Mandriva is. Language? Database? "

.. And someone might not know what Language or Database means in computer parlance. LWN is not catering to complete newbies. If someone doesn't know what Mandriva is, google up.