Episode: 1314
Title: HPR1314: Impressions of Mageia
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1314/hpr1314.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:26:49

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Hello, this is Frank Bell.
Today I'm going to talk about my recent experiences with magia.
I'm motivated to do this because it's been fun playing with magia.
However, I cannot call this a review, it's not disciplined enough.
I had already had magia installed up and running and configured.
And it occurred to me, it might be a good topic for a podcast.
I must say that part of my motivation is the fellow on Sunday morning Linux review
who keeps saying that he doesn't think anybody actually uses magia.
He can now say that they're at least two.
I have a friend here in my love who has been using mandrake and then mandriva
and now magia for years and years and years.
Now I had not looked at magia for a long time.
In fact, the last time I looked at this particular distro,
it was when mandrake had just been forced to change their name to mandriva
because they were charged with infringing on the copyright of mandrake, the magician.
I understand that the mandrake roots brought this claim
but they had no standing in court being vegetables.
First of all, a little bit about the computer.
The machine I have it on is a Lenovo Think Center graphics tablet.
It's an absolutely gorgeous machine which I was fortunate enough to receive as a gift.
It has four gigs of RAM and a 500 gigabyte hard drive and it just screams.
It came with Windows 7 on it.
I have run on it Wubi alongside of Windows 7 and I set it up dual boot with Mint 13
and now I have it dual boot with Windows 7 and magia.
The way I got to magia had to do with my own bumbling and competence.
I was trying to upgrade my Mint install.
Everything seemed to go smoothly until it came time for me to log into my new
upgraded Mint machine and I couldn't.
So being lazy I decided rather than try to fix that problem.
I simply hop over and try something else and I happen to have a magia 2 disk lying around.
So I slapped it into the disk drive, rebooted and installed magia 2.
The install was very smooth.
I pointed it at the partition where Mint was installed.
It asked me the usual questions about time zone and keyboard layout.
Had me set up a password for root.
Yes, magia still believes in root and a password and username for a regular user.
And about 45 minutes later I was logged into my nice new magia 2 machine.
I installed some of my favorite applications.
The Opera Browser Flux Box.
Though I haven't yet tried to configure up Flux Box on this.
E17 for a desktop, virtual box and a couple of small utilities,
particularly the key pass x password vault.
Now the version of E17 that came on that install was actually the E.
Almost 17 version 16.999.xx.
I actually had the magia disk because I had used it in virtual box to investigate
enlightenment when I did my couple of podcasts about enlightenment a few months ago.
This particular version of magia was the KDE version.
There are several spins available to install KDE and GNOME, possibly some others.
And I picked the KDE version because although I'm not a big fan of KDE as a desktop.
It's got more bells and lighter whistles than I find helped me in my workflow.
But I really do like a number of KDE applications.
In particular, Kate, KSNAP Shot, Conqueror.
Yes, I still use Conqueror.
I've never moved to Dolphin.
But Conqueror is my file browser of choice.
So with those applications installed, the base install was about six and a half gigabytes.
Which really, really isn't bad.
However, I did notice that it's not a full KDE install.
As a Slackware user, I always end up coming back to Slackware.
I'm used to the full KDE install that comes with Slackware.
And I noticed in this case, Caligra, for example, the Office Suite, the old renamed K-Office,
was not included and its place was Libra Office, which is fine with me because Libra Office
is my Office Suite of choice.
I also noticed that Kate, my preferred text editor, was not installed, although K-Rite was.
So there were a couple of missing KDE apps that I like to use that I was able to get very easily from the repos.
After a little while, I came out of my bubble and realized that Magia 3 had already been released,
not wanting to blow away what I had just done.
I decided to see whether there was a way I could simply upgrade from Magia 2 to Magia 3.
And I find there was.
I've got a link in the show notes of the, to the Magia 3 release notes with detail how to do that.
The thumbnail version is to download and install an application called MGA Online,
which is a desktop app that can run under GNOME or KDE.
And to make sure that you've got all your updates supplied to your Magia 2 box, of course.
I did the updates. I installed MGA Online, logged out of E17 in the session chooser,
logged back again to KDE and the MGA Online application ran and told me what to do.
How it works is detailed nicely at the link that's in the show notes.
The short version is it told me there's a new version available, reboot your computer,
and select prepare for upgrade. And I did.
And when I rebooted the upgrade process started, I followed the instructions, got it going,
and then I went away and wandered around the house doing chores for a couple of hours or so.
I'm not sure exactly how long I was gone, but when I came back,
it was ready for me to reboot into my new Magia 3 installation.
And it worked flawlessly.
And the process is upgraded not only the base Magia stuff,
but I noticed that my enlightenment desktop had been upgraded from E17 to E17.2.
With all the additional functionality that a full-place D17 install has and working very, very smoothly.
Some additional notes. By default, Magia boots to a graphical display manager.
In the session chooser, you will see the following choices.
The first item will be default. And in my case, if I select default and log in, it logs me into KDE.
By the way, I have to say, the first time you log into KDE, you get the traditional KDE,
welcome the big square on the screen with the icons flashing as the desktop loads.
But in subsequent times, it's an incredibly smooth transition from the graphical display manager right into the KDE desktop without those flashing icons.
That's a nice piece of integrating KDE with the Magia distro.
Other choices on the session chooser include Iced WM, which works.
I might even use it for a while and learn how to configure it, just out of curiosity.
It also includes choices for GNOME and GNOME Classic, but they do not work, which I find rather puzzling.
Why should they appear if GNOME and GNOME Classic are not installed on the machine,
unless they are somehow hard-coded into the GDM?
There's also an entry on mine that says KDE for, as distinct from the entry that says default, that will also take me into KDE for.
There's one called failsafe, and if you select the failsafe desktop, you actually do not go into a graphical desktop,
rather an external window opens, and you can do whatever diagnostics and recovery you need to do to fix the problem that had forced you to choose failsafe mode.
And the last item on the list is Drake 3D. This is an interesting one.
I tried logging into it, and I got a dialog to turn on 3D effects.
So I did, and I logged out, and I logged back in, and I got the same dialog. So I went hunting.
And when I found on the magia forums, and again the link will be in the show notes, the Drake 3D entry is there simply to allow you to set up 3D effects for use in other desktops.
It is not a desktop itself. It means if you screw up your 3D settings and cannot log in, you can always get into the Drake 3D dialog to reset them.
And I, in fact, found myself taking advantage of this, because I discovered that E17 did not like the 3D effects, and I was shortly afterwards logging into the Drake 3D to turn them off.
And then I was able to smoothly log back into E17 and go about my way.
In addition, for you folks who cut your teeth on Ubuntu, magia does not preconfigure a pseudorus file.
If you have succumbed to Ubuntu's pseudu fetish, you will need to configure the pseudu file yourself.
You would open a terminal, SU, to root, type SU, hit enter when it asks for your root password, enter your root password, then enter the command, Vi Sudo.
Victor, India, Sierra, Uniform, Delta, Ohio, and that will open the editor specifically for the pseudorus file.
And in there you can enable pseudu rights for your user if you wish.
I don't like to, but that's probably because I started with Slackware and I got so used to SU into root, or when necessary actually logging in this root, that I just to soon go in this root, do my root stuff and get out, then play around with a bunch of pseudu stuff.
The heart of the configuration for magia is the magia control center or the MCC.
In the MCC you will find GUI tools for doing all kinds of configuration stuff.
When you start the MCC, magia will prompt for your root password.
Once you're in, you can configure users and password, your firewall, add removes software, hardware settings, diagnostics, and so on.
It's very nicely arranged and really easy to use.
One note about adding and removing software, I think the actual magia term on the menu is install and remove software.
You can access the software tool directly from the menu or from the MCC, but for many of the other functions it's just easiest to start the MCC.
The graphical front end for installing and removing software, which is known as RPM Drake, if you invoke it directly from the command line, is very nice.
I find it a lot easier to use than, even though this is an RPM based distro, I do find this a lot easier to use than the graphical add removed software.
They've done a nice job in streamlining it and facilitating the searches.
One thing I found, and I don't know if this is common, but I had to enable repose to do my updates when I first installed magia too.
You do not do this from inside the install and remove software tool.
In the magia control center, in the software area where you would find the update your computer, install and remove software, there's a separate item for configuring the repose.
When I looked in there, I found all I had configured under the magia 2 install was this installation disk.
I had to uncheck that and then check the regular magia repose, and this is going to lead to something else a little later.
Now I mentioned RPM Drake. Drake is a leftover term from Mandrake, and in the old Mandrake distro, all your tools were drakes of some sort.
If you do on LS, slash S-Ben, slash star, D-R-A-K-E, star Drake, there are several drakes that can be invoked from the command line by root.
All of these can also be invoked from the magia control center.
There's an add user Drake, and a user Drake, add user Drake only allows you to add a user, user Drake allows you to add a user and configure or remove existing users.
A keyboard Drake for configuring your keyboard layout and type, a mouse drake for selecting the type of mouse you have.
I did not see any selections in there for configuring mouse behavior, say for example selecting a right-handed versus a left-handed button that's elsewhere in the system.
But simply a PS2 mouse or generic mouse, any old mouse, two button mouse, three button mouse choices of that nature.
There's a scanner Drake for setting up your scanner. I ran it, and it prompted me that the sane scanner packages needed to be installed, apparently they were not installed at default, and I gave it permission, and it installed them.
I have other issues with my scanner, or I'll come back to later.
There's this Drake, which is a disc partitioning tool. Now that gave me some pause.
I have a couple of external drives attached to this machine. They're both formatted in TFS, because sometimes I find myself compelled to boot to the window side if only once a month to make sure I get the updates.
I looked at one of those external, so one gig, I omega, and this Drake told me that it had 164 gig partition on it, and the rest was empty space.
However, when I do a DF, a disc free command, it tells me that that external is a terabyte, 994 gigs, or whatever the exact measurement is, with 19% free, which is what it is, because I know how my stuff I put on that drive.
So I'm a little puzzled why RPM Drake would tell me that it has over 800 gigabytes of empty space.
If someone happens to know the answer, put it in the comments to this post on the hacker public radio website, you might help someone else.
But in the meantime, this tells me to be a little bit leery of this Drake, until I understand it better.
There's log Drake, which is a really nice tool for searching log files. You can select which log files you want to search, put in your search term, and have a go at it and see what you can find.
If you've got the kind of problem that sent you scurrying to the log files, which I hope you don't, those are usually not nice problems.
There's RPM Drake, which as I mentioned before, is the install and remove software tool.
There's one called Transfug Drake, T-R-A-N-S-F-U-D-D-R-A-K-E, which is a wizard for importing windows, documents, and settings into your magia system.
I'm not touching that one, but I guess it could be useful in certain circumstances.
I suspect it's probably a holdover from the earlier days of Linux when Linux was not as versatile, stable, or as highly developed as it is now.
I've never had any problem. I've never wanted to import my windows settings into a Linux system, and I can usually get the documents with no trouble at all.
Then there's one called XF Drake. That's uppercase X, uppercase F, and then lowercase Drake, where you can configure some settings for your video.
I saw two interesting particular options you can enable transparency, and you can turn on or off the graphical display manager at boot.
As I mentioned by default is on, I have not yet tested turning it off. I will probably one day when I have some time on my hands, turn it off, reboot, and see exactly what happens.
Whether or not I have to set up a DocSex and an RC file to start my graphical desktop or what have you.
Those are the Drake's that I saw swimming on that pond.
A couple of other things I ran into. I have a number of MP4 files, and I played these successfully in Slackware and Windows, and so I went to play them in VLC for the first time, and VLC through this following warning.
No suitable decoder module. VLC does not support the audio or video format, MP4A.
Unfortunately, there is no way for you to fix this, and I think MP4A refers to the audio, because when I played these, I had video, but no audio.
So I did some searching, and I rather quickly found an answer on the magia forums again, and I'll have a link to this particular forum post in the show notes.
Telling me that I would need to download VLC and install it from the Tainted repositories.
So the word Tainted, of course, is kind of scary. So I did a little research and found out that in magia world, Tainted means this, and this is from the magia release notes.
The Tainted repository includes packages released under a free license. The main criteria for placing packages in this repository is that they may infringe on patents and copyright laws in some countries.
EG Multimedia Codex needed to play various audio video files, packages needed to play commercial video DVDs, and so on.
It seems kind of similar to what in Debian world is referred to as non-free.
Looking because I wanted to play my video, I went looking in the RPM Drake, the Insolven removed software tool, and I searched for the word Tainted.
I don't know, I'm sorry, I searched for the word MP4, and the first thing I found was something called Zeen hyphen FAD.
I don't know what FAD stands for in this context, but I installed that, and I was able to play those MP4s then successfully in Zeen.
Yesterday while I was polishing up my notes for this, I decided to attack the VLC problem again, and I did find, oh, I didn't mention, but in order to search for stuff in the Tainted Repos,
I had to go back into my repository configuration and enable the Tainted Repos.
The ones I had previously enabled were not the Tainted ones, the Tainted ones actually had Tainted in the name of the repository.
I did finally get these videos playing in VLC, what I found I had to do was that simply installing VLC from the Tainted Repos was not enough, I had to first remove it, and then install the Tainted version and the appropriate Tainted plugins, and now those MP4s play just fine.
I'm having another problem setting up my printer, I have an HPL7680, a really nice printer, it's getting on to being, oh, I guess six years old now, but it's really been a rock of a machine, it works fine with every other computer I have in the house,
but when I try to print from magia no rock, I've set it up both using magia's own configure printer tools, then deleted it from cops and set it up using HPLIP,
I've never before had a problem with my HP printer using HPLIP to set up the drivers, and when I print, if I print one page it pulls two sheets of paper, it prints three disjointed lines at the top of the first sheet and the second sheet comes out blank.
When I looked at the log files and the log files seemed to indicate that the computer thinks everything printed just fine, and the printer yes, I have tested it, it is still working fine from my Slackware machine on the other side of the room, or from my Debian machine that sits right next to this magia box.
So that one I'm still puzzling on, I've got a thread story on Linux questions, hopefully I'll find an answer there, if I do I will post that in the show notes, so that anyone stumbling across to will find out what the resolution is.
My overall reaction to magia 3, it is slick, it's a nice piece of work, I am not really a big fan of RPM distributions, I really don't think that has much to do with the package format anymore.
As long as you stick to your own distro's repos, you're probably in good shape, I think it has to do with how the graphical package managers work, I really like synaptic, synaptic is just so easy to use in search.
And in my experience with, say, synatos, and with fedora, I have not found their graphical package managers to be of the same caliber, however I will say this RPM Drake is just a nice piece of work, and it does not get in the way of what you're trying to do, which to my mind is really the key to quote the fellows from the going on.
As long as podcast, you want to be able to use Linux to get things done, as opposed to use Linux to try to fix Linux.
Anyway, I hope if you're considering doing a little distro hopping, and you've been thinking about maybe trying magia that this helps you out a bit, and I'll talk to you later.
If you want to email me, you can email me at Frank at pineviewfarm.net, pineviewfarm is all one word, no spaces, no punctuation, and my website is www.pineviewfarm.net. Thank you very much.
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