Mageia 9 Release Notes

Contents

Introduction

Mageia (from Greek μαγεία (mageía) - magic, enchantment) is a free and open-source operating system from the GNU/Linux family of operating systems. Mageia is developed by a community of dedicated users, and backed by the non-profit organisation Mageia.org - a group of individuals elected by the Mageia Board. Whether you're a first-time GNU/Linux user, a software developer, an experienced system administrator or a casual web-surfer, Mageia is the right choice for you. Mageia can be installed on a computer as both the main operating system and an alternative to one or several other installed operating systems.

Note that versions listed in this page are for the release medias. During a Mageia release lifetime we push thousands of updates and hundreds of backports packages. For example find here current lists of Mageia 9 x86_64 updates and backports packages.

Available installation media

Mageia can be installed using three types of installation media:

All ISO images can be burned to a DVD or dumped to an USB flash drive. For further information please see the Installation Media wiki page about how to choose, download, check, fix, burn, use the media, and restore USB stick.

The different download options can be found on the Mageia 9 download page. Both direct (FTP and HTTP) and BitTorrent downloads are available.

For more information, have a look at Select and use ISOs in our installer manual.

The Mageia repositories

The software packages that are included in Mageia reside in three different repositories, depending on the type of licence applied to each package. Here is an overview of these repositories:

The Non-free repository is enabled by default in the installer, but can be disabled if necessary.

The Tainted repository is available but disabled by default, i.e., it's completely opt-in. It is a good idea to verify your region's laws before using packages from this repository.

32-bit repositories on 64-bit systems

32-bit repositories are configured, but disabled by default on 64-bit systems. Some 64-bit programs such as Steam require dependencies found in 32-bit repositories. Therefore, if you would like to install software which depends on 32-bit packages, make sure that you have the "Core 32-bit Release" and "Core 32-bit Updates" repositories enabled in RPMDrake. Likewise, some 64-bit packages from the Non-free or Tainted repositories could depend on 32-bit packages from their respective repositories. Thus, it is strongly recommended to always enable repositories in pairs (32-bit together with 64-bit) so as to not encounter issues while updating.

Release highlights

Smaller disk footprint

The size of the minimal install (when disabling the recommended packages) has been reduced. - It's the smallest since Mageia 4.

The RPM DB has switched to SQLite

The RPM database no longer uses the old and unmaintained Berkeley DB. It now uses the modern SQLite. Conversion is performed during upgrade from Mageia 8.

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 4.18.

More information on changes from RPM 4.16 (which shipped with Mageia 8) to RPM 4.18 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 9 ships with DNF v4.14.0.

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 9, 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).

Isodumper

Isodumper is a tool to write ISO images on memory devices. The checking routine after writing operations now looks 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 24.0.5 version of the engine) with many additional tools such as docker buildx (BuildKit plugin) and docker compose v2 (orchestration with format version 3 support as plugin, replacing the separate binary of version 1), containerd (daemon controlling runC), docker-registry (share of images), and python-docker (python 3 libraries for engine API management).

Note that up to Mageia 8, Docker (up to 20.10.x) was using aufs storage by default. Starting with Mageia 9, aufs storage isn't supported anymore and Docker is using overlay2 storage (from 24.0.x up). During upgrade all images are saved and restored to allow for a smooth migration, however, this requires time *and * free storage under the directory used (/var/cache/docker by default). On a system with 525 images sizing 88 Go compressed, migration through urpmi took 34 hours for backup and 2 hours for restore. So it is advised to run this operation separately from the system release upgrade to avoid a long lock on the RPM database and allow to control it. We suggest to before upgrading Mageia 9, adding docker to /etc/urpmi/skip.list to avoid it being updated, and after successful Mageia upgrade and you are sure you have time and disk space, remove it from list and perform system update.

LiveCD Tools

With Mageia 9, the LiveCD Tools have been rebased to the latest version (v27.1).

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

Memtest86+

PCMemTestT which was a fork was merged back into Memtest86+ memory test utility. So Memtest86+ replaces PCMemTest as the memory test utility on all the Mageia ISOs. It may also be installed on a user's system, where it will be automatically added to the system boot menu.

remove-old-kernels

This is a new tool which removes old kernels from systems. It works in the background without any user intervention and defaults to keeping the three most recently installed kernels. This resolves an issue which could cause systems with limited storage to run out of root partition space after many kernel updates. As well as the default automatic mode which is run weekly it may be configured and run manually from the command line. Run with -h option to see help. It is also available to be run from the Mageia main menu where it may be found under Tools -> System tools. There is also a man page which covers more detail for expert users.

Note:
If you upgrade from Mageia 8 the tool is not installed as part of the upgrade process.

You need to install remove-old-kernels to get access to this tool mga#31642.

Base system

Kernel and hardware support

All hardware managed by this kernel version is enabled. The kernel provides better graphics with Mesa 3D 23.1.

Graphic drivers

Mesa 3D has been updated to Mesa 3D 23.1.

X Window System (X11)

Mageia 9 ships with X.Org 21.1.8. XWayland 22.1.9 has been split from the Xserver and is packaged as standalone tool for easier maintenance.

AMD video drivers
Proprietary AMD driver
NVIDIA drivers
Proprietary NVIDIA driver

NVIDIA's proprietary drivers are provided in the nonfree repositories, 64 bit only:

For more information see here.

Optimus laptops

Some laptops comes with "Hybrid Graphics", meaning they have two GPU: one is usually "internal" (or "integrated") into the CPU, and is called IGP (Integrated Graphic Processor), and the other is "dedicated", external to the CPU, and it is called "discrete" (DGP, Discrete/Dedicated Graphics Processor). The integrated is power efficient, while the discrete is faster.

Owners of NVIDIA Optimus laptops (integrated Intel or AMD/ATI CPU+GPU, plus a discrete NVIDIA GPU) now have three ways to benefit from the power of their NVIDIA GPU:

In all three cases, when configuring the graphics drivers, one must during install and the usual Mageia tools configure only the integrated GPU (at least in most Optimus configurations), as it is typically the only one physically connected to a monitor. (If failing, try the other way around.)

Sound servers

Mageia 9 supports both PulseAudio and PipeWire as sound servers.

By default both gets installed, but only PulseAudio is enabled.

We here provide instructions on how to switch between PulseAudio and PipeWire.

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 9 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 5.27.5, built on top of Qt 5.15.7 and KDE Frameworks 5.105 and with KDE Applications 23.04.1.

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 R535 (nvidia-current) nonfree driver 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 desktop environment is the Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM).

Ksysguard is replaced by plasma-systemmonitor.

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

GNOME

GNOME 44.2 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 "Flashback" has also been added as yet another alternative. It provides a similar user experience to the GNOME 2.x series sessions. The differences to the MATE project is that GNOME Flashback uses GTK+ 3 and tries to follow the current GNOME development by integrating recent changes of the GNOME libraries.

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+3-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. Starting with Mageia 9, LXDE migrated from GTK+2 to GTK+3. LXDE cannot use pipewire as sound server, only pulseaudio.

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

Xfce

Xfce 4.18 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 1.3.0 is provided and included in the Classical ISO.

To adjust the settings of the transparency compositor picom, in combination with the window manager openbox, you can install picom-conf.

LXQt is now provided with Kvantum to allow the settings of various themes. It can also be used with Plasma.

MATE

MATE 1.26.0 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 5.6 is provided.

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

Enlightenment

The Enlightenment task package comes with E25.4 and Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) 1.26.3. The major 0.25 release features a completely new, flat theme with both preconfigured alternative colour palettes (including a light theme) and the ability to edit the colours. In addition, there is another Mageia-branded theme, m-Dimensions, based on the older desktop theme, updated with all new features except the colour palette. Other important changes include the addition of touchpad configuration options, improvements to the sound mixer and a significant change in default settings: edge binding are now turned off by default. For more details on this version, see https://www.enlightenment.org/news/2021-12-26-enlightenment-0.25.0.

Of course, Mageia includes E's Econnman UI for the connman connection manager (if enabled - default is systemd-networkd.service with the Netapplet), along with four EFL-based applications: the Terminology terminal emulator, the Ephoto image viewer, the light-weight Rage video player and the Evisum system monitor. Ecrire, a basic EFL-based text editor, is also available as a recommends. Note that Ecrire's UI and font settings do not work properly with the m-Dimensions theme.

For those new 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 can be 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.

Currently, one issue has been observed: 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 9 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, fvwm3, 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 7.5. See official release notes for 7.3, 7.4 & 7.5 for details.

A new tool for off-line voice dictation has been packaged, based on Kaldi, Vosk, nerd-dictation and eloGraf.

Internet apps

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.

DisplayCAL is a tool to calibrate colours of a display using a sensor. It comes back as it has been ported to Python 3.

Blender for 3D animation is now in release 3.3.4.

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 9 release cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 9 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 9. The following section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game category.

Education

Mageia 9 comes with gcompris-qt 3.3 which brings some new activities.

Software Development

Compilers and tools

Glibc has been updated to 2.36. GCC has been updated to 12.3, GDB to 12.1 and Valgrind to 3.20.0. LLVM has been updated to 15.0.

Firebird has been updated to 4.0.2

IPython has been updated to 8.10.

Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions (long-term support when available), such as Qt 5.15.7 and GTK+ 3.24.38.

GTK4 is also provided at version 4.10.3.

Tcl/Tk is at version 8.6.13.

Ocaml has been updated to 4.14.0.

Java stack has been updated to 17, java 8 and Java 11 are still available but are not the default. Java latest provides the latest java not released. Currently Java 18.

Mono has been updated to 6.12.

The MinGW stack has been updated.

Virtualization

QEmu has been updated to 7.2.

libvirt has been updated to 9.1.0, virt-manager to 4.1.0, libguestfs to 1.49. Some of libguestfs subpackages are now built from guestfs-tools 1.49.

Xen is at version 4.17.0.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is at version 7.0.10.

Programming languages

Python 3 has been updated to 3.10.11.

Python 2 is being retired (most python2 modules have already been removed).

Perl has been updated to 5.36.

Ruby has been updated to 3.1.4.

Rust is at version 1.70.0. It will be updated during Mageia 9's support life to follow new developments.

PHP has been updated to 8.2, which gives a further performance improvement.

Qt libraries are available both in 5.15.17 and 6.4.1, with Python bindings through PyQt5, PyQt6, PySide2 and PySide6.

Server applications

Nextcloud

See Nextcloud

Veyon

This application that lets you monitor and control a group of computers replaces italc. It is available in version 4.7.4.

Upgrading from Mageia 8

Upgrading from Mageia 8 is supported, and has been fine-tuned over the past few months.

Also see How to choose the right Mageia upgrade method.

Note:
Please also read the Mageia 9 errata chapter "Upgrade issues".

Preparations

Not supported:

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

Online-Upgrade

The Mageia Update notification applet, Mageia Online, will notify you when 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). Each method is outlined below.

For any on-line upgrade method, first:

Note:
Use a wired internet connection if possible, especially when you're using nonfree wlan drivers.

Online-Upgrade, using mgaonline (GUI)

If it does not offer the upgrade:

$ su -c 'mgaapplet-upgrade-helper --new_distro_version=9'

Online-Upgrade, using urpmi (CLI)

This method is useful when the root partition is encrypted as the booted system is already decrypting the partition. 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 by editing it at boot and to get then a login prompt. Another option is to use the command: systemctl isolate multi-user.target

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 (see mga#25072). The commands are included below.

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:

$ su -
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
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 (/ if 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 8 repositories with urpmi.removemedia -a and urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist 'http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.8.$ARCH.list' like above, and clean the cache by issuing urpmi --clean.

Online-Upgrade, 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.

$ su -
dnf upgrade --refresh
dnf install 'dnf-command(system-upgrade)'
dnf system-upgrade --releasever 9 download --allowerasing
This command asks for confirmation and tells the required disk space before starting the download. 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. When you know all kinds of space is enough, say yes to let it download. It will also dry run a transaction test.
The next command will immediately reboot your system!
dnf system-upgrade reboot

Using the installer to Upgrade

You can use both the minimal Netinstall, and the big traditional (so, non-Live) DVD ISOs to do clean installs, but also to perform an upgrade.

That means that if wired ethernet is not available, you must use nonfree Netinstall for connecting using wifi, because updating need connection to repositories. - See warning below.

If you have wired ethernet you can choose either, Netinstall or traditional DVD ISO. The DVD is larger in initial download, but less need be downloaded during upgrade.

Upgrading using the traditional DVD ISO

Warning!
Upgrades attempted without setting up the online repositories are not supported.

It is important that the online repositories be set up during the upgrade as the DVD ISO only includes a subset of the complete package set in Mageia online repositories, and:

On the first reboot after upgrade, use the command 'urpmi --auto-update' to make sure all packages were updated. In case of problems see If upgrade failed.

Upgrading using the Netinstall ISO

Follow the same instructions above as for traditional DVD installer, it is very similar.

Also see Mageia Netinstall ISO.

Upgrading an encrypted install

Using Netinstall or DVD ISO.

Firstly, on the running system to upgrade:

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.

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 on systems that had them before the upgrade, but won't receive any support. Moreover, they won't receive any updates, which means they are likely to get outdated from upstream versions first, and potentially get exposed to security issues second - if not already. You should probably switch to an upstream version, or a better maintained alternative but that's your own decision.

The category contains the following packages, alphabetically:


Replaced on upgrade

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.

This category contains the following packages, alphabetically:


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