A review written by Christine Hall, explores different features of recently released Mageia 5. Mageia is a free and open source GNU/Linux distribution initially forked from Mandriva Linux.
Mageia 5, released on Friday and over a year in the making, is familiar territory to those of us who cut our Linux teeth on Mandriva back in the days when it was called Mandrake. That’s not to say that the distro is old or outdated, far from it, but any Mandrake old-timer will instantly recognize the roots of this distro.That’s a good thing. In this age when the distro gene pool is mostly based on two families, either Debian/Ubuntu or RHEL/Fedora, it’s good to see some other branches of the Linux family tree thrive.Of course, there are others: SUSE and Slackware come immediately to mind, as does PCLOS, which also started life as a Mandrake fork, but within a release or two had moved so far in its own direction that it was no longer associated with its parent distro. This seems fitting, since Mandrake itself started as a clone of Red Hat, but within very few releases no longer resembled dear ol’ dad at all — other than the fact that they both relied on RPM packages.