Hello. I am new to Mageia Linux. I was wondering if like Mandriva, there are distribution sources, from which you can download software. I know that in Mandriva, there were some distribution sources. You could download software in 3 main categories: main, free (I believe), and non-free. You could do what most people do and setup urpmi to download from these sites, or you could do what I did and pre-download the software, stick it on the NAS, and then run genhdlist2 to get it to recognize this. Also, is Mandriva 2010.1 software compatible with this?

I switched on a trial basis because it was newer, based off of Mandriva (since Mandriva no longer has the free version of it's distribution), and should be as easy to configure. I was having trouble with configuring my server, and I decided, why not try Mageia, and see if I still have as much trouble?

Since Mageia is a fork of Mandriva, most aspects of software management work as they did in Mandriva. The main differences in the repositories are that Mageia has combined main and contrib into a single core repo, and the packages that used to be in the separate PLF repo's are now in the Mageia tainted repo's:

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installin...ions_available

The Mageia mirrors:
http://mirrors.mageia.org/
http://mirrors.mageia.org/status

The drakx tools are available and are being maintained by Mageia (in part by the same people who used to maintain them in Mandriva).

It's possible that some Mandriva 2010.1 software may still work in Mageia 4, but a lot has changed "under the hood" since then.

Jim

Thanks. It seems like there isn't quite as much of a software selection for Mageia Linux as there was for Mandriva Linux. That is, unless you were to compile from source yourself or something.

If there is specific software that you would like to see added to Mageia, you can open a bug report "New package request":

https://bugs.mageia.org/

You should be sure to describe the special features that the software has that would make it a useful addition to the repositories. A packager may package the software and import it. However, there are a limited number of packagers and they are all very busy already.

Jim

Thanks. If I encounter a more specific example, I will try that.

Don't overlook the option of compiling from sources.

I had to install a program on Mageia today because it wasn't in the repos (it was abook).

I had no difficulty compiling it. From that I draw the conclusion that, unlike some distros which have required me to install various "dev" packages in order to compile software, Mageia comes by default with the libraries necessary for compiling from sources.