Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux formed in September 2010 by former employees and contributors to the popular French Linux distribution. Unlike Mandriva, which is a commercial entity, the Mageia project is a community project and a non-profit organisation whose goal is to develop a free Linux-based operating system.
Environments
Mageia 2 has all the major desktop environments:
- KDE4 SC 4.8.2,
- GNOME 3.4,
- XFCE 4.9,
- LXDE,
- Razor-Qt,
- E17.
And then there are the window managers, including Openbox, WindowMaker, IceWM, Fluxbox, Fvwm2 and Awesome.
Web
Choose your web browser from Firefox ESR 10.0.4, Chromium-browser 180.1025.160, Epiphany 3.4.1 or Opera 11.64 – or one of the many others such as Lynx or Konqueror; then pick an email client from KMail 4.8.2, Thunderbird ESR 10.0.4, Evolution 3.4.1 or maybe Claws-Mail or Mutt.
Video
For editing video files, try Avidemux, Kino or OpenShot; for subtitles, there's Gaupol or Subtitles Composer; use MythTV, Miro, tvtime, FreetuxTV or Me TV for watching or recording TV programmes.
Messaging
Choose from Kopete, Pidgin, Empathy or Kadu for instant messaging; use Quassel, Konversation, XChat-Gnome or KVIrc for IRC chat; try QuteCom or Ekiga (or even Skype) for VOIP.
Office
The two full-featured office suites LibreOffice and Calligra are there, as well as AbiWord, and a host of text editors including Kate; for finance there's KMyMoney, Skrooge or the professional-level GnuCash.
Image
Use GIMP for powerful image manipulation, or Inkscape for vector drawing; Blender is there for serious animation. DigiKam or Showfoto will take care of your photos, talk to your camera and give you more basic image editing.
Sound
For playing audio files, choose from Amarok 2.5.0 and Rhythmbox, among others; use VLC, Totem or MPlayer for video and for audio, or use the XBMC Media Center as your home entertainment system. Some packages can be found in both the Core and Tainted repositories: the packages in the Core repository support only non-patent-encumbered codecs and the packages in the Tainted repository support all codecs, for users who live in countries where those codecs don't infringe local laws.
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