MaximumHoyt

The subject of third-party repositories for Mageia is a touchy one for some people. For the maintainers of a distro, they feel that third-party repos cause compatibility problems and the packages are not subject to adequate. The third-party maintainers believe that they are maintaining either specially modified packages useful to their members or packages that the main distro cannot, for legal reasons, maintain and distribute. Both are correct. If you need a package offered by a third-party repo, then by all means use it carefully. If not, don't even add the repos to your local repositories. For Mandriva, the PLF at plf.zarb.org  (project terminated) and MIB at PianetaLinux.org provide those services. For Mageia4, it looks like BlogDrake.net is taking the lead. They provide repositories for Mageia1 through Mageia8. You may add the appropriate Mageia4 repos as root using the commands below: (NOTE: the BlogDrake site appears to be down at this time) Mageia 4 urpmi.addmed

I recently compared the installation of Mageia3 with Fedora 18 (both done in a VirtualBox virtual machine). When installed and fully configured to taste, you have essentially the same level of usability and ease of administration with a similar choice of desktop environments and current versions of applications running on a recent kernel using SysV-style init and RPM packaging. The meaningful differences are more easily illustrated with some history, so this will not be the typical, dull, useless version-to-version comparison with a plethora of gratuitous screen-shots and the inevitable inane jargon overload. Fedora has been the community release of Red Hat since RHEL became the primary distro for Red Hat proper. It enjoys a more frequent release schedule than RHEL and is more focused on the desktop. Think of it as the development version of the workstation companion to the Enterprise version of Red Hat Linux taht is now in its 18th release.  Mageia would seem t