Wednesday, January 26, 2022

Mageia 8 is out

I was a fan of Mandrake and Mandriva and it went into dormancy and Mageia Linux kept it afloat from France.

It was the first commercial portable OS and Globe Trotter was its innovation.
Soon after Globe Trotter it went bust.
Since then, I have not used Mageia as a regular installation and lost interest in Mageia.

According to reviews it's version 8 is pretty good.

However Download speed of Ceylon is currently at snail pace and I need at least two days to download almost 5GB Iso.

I have download it and installed it on hard disk and an external drive.

It brings back nostalgia of Mandrive with a blue desktop.

I have to say something nice about it.

It has more utilities than Ubuntu 21.10 frugal edition.

It takes over the entire hard disk.

All the utilities work well Mageia Control Center has a partition tool which allows one to resize the home partition, which I did to save free space to install Debian and Emmabantus.

It has No ESP (Debian and Emmabantus, too do not have ESP at boot time) and won't allow dual booting.

Finally when Ubuntu was I stalled with its ESP partition, all other distributions were identified as bootable with the GRUG 2 utility.
Ubuntu does difficult things easily and luckily I never use it but have a copy in an external disk to trouble shoot.
Funny thing about Debian is once installed it never fails and no need of updating software.
In my latest book on Rebirth, I am going to state that Linus probably has had rebirth connection to me like our dog who inspired me be a Linux addict.
Now that I am off alcohol, I need annother addiction to be tagged onto.
Fortunately, for me our download speed in Ceylon is hopeless that it takes 4 days for a 4GB image to download.
They are



Currently downloading FreeBSD.

It took nearly two hours to download.

I had to configure the Transmission utility to speed up the download speed.

Mageia installation bit messy.
It did not install on the free space and did not configure the boot loader.
It only allowed plasma desktop but was not as flashy as with Debian 11.

It needs 50GB for root and took the entire disk for home partition.
I resized the home partition.
I am using Ubuntu to do the honors and keep four distributions in the hard disk with over 700GB left for Data.

I downloaded FreeBSD and tried to install it on an external disk and failed.

It is over 4.8GB and could not be written on a DVD to test it live on a DVD.

When I find a Big 10GB DVD I will try it as a live session.

USB image is 1.1GB.