Mageia is a

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

-based

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

, distributed as

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

. It was forked from the

Mandriva Linux Mandriva Linux (a fusion of the French distribution Mandrake Linux and the Brazilian distribution Conectiva Linux) is a discontinued Linux distribution developed by Mandriva S.A. Each release lifetime was 18 months for base updates (Linux, syste ...

distribution Distribution may refer to: Mathematics *Distribution (mathematics), generalized functions used to formulate solutions of partial differential equations * Probability distribution, the probability of a particular value or value range of a vari ...

. The

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

term () means enchantment, fascination, glamour, wizardry. The first release of the software distribution, Mageia 1, took place in June 2011.

History

Mageia was created in 2010 as a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

of Mandriva Linux, by a group of former employees of Mandriva S.A. and several other members of the Mandriva community. On September 2, 2010, Edge IT, one of the subsidiaries of Mandriva, was placed under liquidation process by the

Tribunal de commerce In France, the ''tribunal de commerce'' (plural ''tribunaux de commerce'', literally "commercial courts") are the oldest courts in the French judicial organization. They were created at the end of the Middle Ages. The commercial court has jur ...

in Paris; effective September 17, all assets were liquidated and employees were let go. The next day, on September 18, 2010, some of these former employees, who were mostly responsible for the development and maintenance of the Mandriva Linux distribution, and several community members announced the creation of Mageia, with the support of many members of the community of developers, users and employees of Mandriva Linux.

Desktop environments

Mageia can use all major desktop environments. As was the case with Mandrake and Mandriva Linux,

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

is the main and the most used environment. End-users can choose from KDE and GNOME 64 bit Live DVD editions, 32 bit and 64 bit Xfce live DVD editions, and any environment in the full DVD installation edition. It uses Mageia Control Center.

LXDE LXDE (abbreviation for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment with comparatively low resource requirements. This makes it especially suitable for use on older or resource-constrained personal computers such as netb ...

LXQt LXQt is a free and open source lightweight desktop environment. It was formed from the merger of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects. Like its GTK predecessor LXDE, LXQt does not ship or develop its own window manager, instead LXQt lets the user ...

, Cinammon,

MATE Mate may refer to: Science * Mate, one of a pair of animals involved in: ** Mate choice, intersexual selection ** Mating * Multi-antimicrobial extrusion protein, or MATE, an efflux transporter family of proteins Person or title * Friendship ...

and Enlightenment are also available.

Application repository

Mageia offers a very large repository of software, such as productivity applications and a large variety of games. It was the first Linux distribution in which

MariaDB MariaDB is a community-developed, commercially supported fork of the MySQL relational database management system (RDBMS), intended to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. Development is led by some of the ori ...

replaced Oracle's

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

Development

Mageia was originally planned to be released on a nine-month release cycle, with each release to be supported for 18 months. Actual practice has been to release a new version when the Mageia development community feels the new release is ready from quality and stability viewpoints. The latest stable version is Mageia 8, released on 26 February 2021.

Version history

References

External links

*
Official wiki
*
Mageia on OpenSourceFeed Gallery
{{Linux distributions KDE Mandriva Linux RPM-based Linux distributions X86-64 Linux distributions Linux distributions