Mageia 3 released [LWN.net]

The much-delayed Mageia 3 release is out. "We dedicate this release to the memory of Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration to those he left behind. We miss his brilliance, his courtesy and his dedication." Changes include an RPM upgrade, the 3.8 kernel, availability of GRUB2 (but GRUB is still the default bootloader), and more. See the release notes for lots of details.

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Mageia 3 released

Posted May 20, 2013 3:20 UTC (Mon) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (5 responses)

... and it works well. Congratulations, everyone!

One thing: if you are using an i7 with the integrated GPU, you'll need to boot with "nomodeset" (and sacrifice xrandr). Otherwise, X won't start. This is a bug that has affected the kernel since about 3.6.5 and is present in multiple other distros (eg the latest Linux Mint 15 liveCD, and the Ubuntu nightly with kernel 3.9.0), so it's not Mageia's fault).

Mageia 3 released

Posted May 20, 2013 10:41 UTC (Mon) by chris.wilson (guest, #42619) [Link] (3 responses)

Pardon? Do you mind ellucidating what the issue actually is?

Mageia 3 released

Posted May 20, 2013 11:58 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Same here. I've been running Rawhide for almost a year on an i7 Ivy Bridge CPU without seeing anything like the described problem.

Mageia 3 released

Posted May 20, 2013 22:14 UTC (Mon) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (1 responses)

> Pardon? Do you mind ellucidating what the issue actually is?

I wish I knew. I've had some difficulty tracking it down in detail.
I did report it here, but my own kernel skills aren't good enough to do a detailed debug.
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9831

Xorg just gives up, with:
(EE) intel(0): failed to set mode: Invalid argument

It's an i7 CPU, in an ASUS P8Z68-V LX motherboard, with 2x 1600x1200 monitors attached.

For now, I have it working by using the kernel 3.6.5 package from Mageia 2.

Mageia 3 released

Posted May 21, 2013 18:35 UTC (Tue) by jimparis (guest, #38647) [Link]

> I've had some difficulty tracking it down in detail.
> I did report it here, but my own kernel skills aren't good enough to do a detailed debug.

With an old working kernel and a new broken kernel, tracking it down should be easy with "git bisect". The tricky part is building and installing the kernel yourself from a git repo rather than using prebuilt packages, but once you figure that out, it should be fairly quick work to pinpoint the bug.

Mageia 3 released

Posted May 20, 2013 11:49 UTC (Mon) by danielpf (guest, #4723) [Link]

Mageia 3 has been freshly installed on a Thinkpad W510 with i7 Q 820 processor without experiencing this problem. No "nomodeset" is given at boot in /boot/grub/menu.lst.

There were owever some problems upgrading from 2 to 3 that newcomers wouldn't solve easily. For newcomers, it is usually safer to install anew the system especially if the /home is not on a distinct partition. A complete backup is always strongly recommended.
First, old 32 bit devel libraries were conflicting with new 64 bit devel libraries. This had to be fixed during install by going to a console (ctrl alt F3), mounting the system (chroot /mnt) and removing them by hand (rpm -e lib...i586). "rpm -qa | grep devel | grep lib | grep -v lib64 | grep -v glibc" provides a list of such packages.
Second, the user directories and their content in /home were all set to the root.root owner! There was no way to login properly in KDE, XFCE, or E17 as a user.
There again going to a console (ctrl alt F3), loging as root, and changing ownership of the directories (chown -R user.user /home/user) fixed the problem.

The final product is extremely enjoyable. Over Mageia 2 the overall inteactivity is much improved, as well as the display readibility.