Playing with Gnome Boxes Beta in Mageia Alpha!

Mageia Foundation released the first Alpha version towards to Mageia 3 (March 2013) three days ago, with UsrMove! If I am not wrong Mageia is just the second popular distro (after Fedora) that migrates to UsrMove, and that shows that the people there, chancing the optimal solutions.

Speaking of popularity, Mageia’s market trend grows rapidly and by taking into consideration that Mageia 3 is a huge improvement from version 2,  it won’t be long till Mageia will look Ubuntu in the eyes.  

There is no reason to make a review on Mageia Alpha, because I have already checked on it twice few days ago. So there is nothing new, but updates.

Gnome Boxes 3.5.91

Matthias Clasen (Gnome dev in GTK/GLib) has done a detailed review in Gnome Boxes “A look at gnome-boxes” so I skipped that, and instead I screencast-ed the new fancy effects in Gnome Boxes.

I run Mageia Alpha 1 (plus the two days updates) in a Fedora 17 box with VirtualBox 4.2 RC4.  It was impossible to run it smoothly with Gnome Shell, so I switched to Fallback mode -which I hope they won’t remove-  but still I had some rendering issues, because Boxes makes usage of OpenGL. Animations are lot better in reality than this video :)

By the way the song in YouTube is called “Isn´t there really a place for me in this world?” by Silvander and I downloaded from Jamendo.

Gnome Boxes isn’t ready to substitute Virtual Box yet, but it isn’t bad, huh? :)

Mageia Control Center

Mageia follows OpenSUSE’s example with a rich Control Center that bypasses Gnome Control Center. I don’t know why they do that, because Ubuntu’s paradigm with the simple Control Center is already successful.  Fedora use it also.

Although I disagree with the many settings, Mageia’s Control Center is really straight forward and easy to use. Views on left works perfectly for the plethora of items.

Two Network settings. Same for the sound. Which should I pick and why? I am just wondering..

This is nice, a parental control module pre-installed! Gnome also works on that with a much more advanced system that is going to be integrated part of Gnome. They call it Lockdown, but development is in a really early stage.

Mageia Control Center Vs OpenSUSE Yast

Yast in openSUSE 12.2 is quite powerful which dozens of options and you have GUI for many configuration files.

I don’t want to be negative to any open source effort, but the above figure is a mess. Mageia is a clear winner on here with no doubts. The screens can’t demonstrate the differences, you have to try them both, but Yast is so unpolished with new windows to open in every option and so many un-needed icons, DSL, ISDN, Modem, Network Settings..

A Gnome Control Center with views/tabs on the left. This is an old Mockup which has been dropped. But if Gnome gets more options in Control Center, it will be a nice solution.

Overview

It is pity that Mageia 3  needs six more months :(