Last September, the mageia group emerged as a fork of Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) Linux.
Years ago, I was a fan and user of Mandrake, but thinks have gone off the rails every since founder Gael Duval was forced out in 2006. Yet somehow, Mandriva has remained.
This week, mageia released an alpha 1 ISO of the distro, codename ‘Cantine’ – the release is very rough and is intended for bleeding edge testing, though users of Mandriva Linux 2010.2 system can ‘upgrade’ to mageia for testing if they want too.
So what does this all mean?
“We have our own repositories ready, with cleaned up packages and
our own policies (software media changes, management of licenses),” the mageia website states. “We have our own build system up and running (and it’s running rather well).”
Bootstraping a new distro – even a fork – is no easy task. In my view the mageia developers are going through an exceptionally thorough and methodical approach to not just fork Mandriva as a clone, but rather to remake the distro into something that (ultimately) will be more than the some of its legacy parts.
There is still alot of work that needs to be done and devs are currently targeting June for the final release.
