The Mageia Project, through Rémi Verschelde, has announced earlier today, September 10, that the Mageia 4 Linux distribution will reach end of life next week, on September 19, 2015.
Officially released on February 1, 2014, the Mageia 4.0 GNU/Linux operating system brought many new features, such as initial UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support, the Mageia Welcome screen, kernel packages from the Linux 3.12 LTS (Long-Term Support) branch, as well as the systemd 208 init system.
Moreover, the distribution included the RPM 4.11.1 and urpmi 7.31 package managers, implemented GRUB2 as an alternative bootloader, added support for FullHD (1920x1080) resolutions, updated the LibreOffice office suite to version 4.1.3.2, and provided users with the KDE 4.11, GNOME 3.10, Xfce 4.10, Cinnamon 2.0, and MATE 1.6 desktop environments.
Today's bad news for Mageia 4.0 and Mageia 4.1 users is that the 4.x branch of the popular GNU/Linux distribution will no longer receive security and critical patches, nor software updates, and no new packages will be added to the main software repositories, which will be closed starting September 19, 2015.
"As we are now very close to this date, we wanted to give you a heads-up in case you haven’t done the upgrade yet: after September 19th, Mageia 4 will not receive any new security or bugfix update, so you are encouraged to do the upgrade as soon as possible," says Rémi Verschelde.
Users are urged to upgrade to Mageia 5 as soon as possible
The Mageia developers urge all users of the Mageia 4 operating system to upgrade their installations to the current stable version of the OS, Mageia 5, as soon as possible. For detailed upgrade instructions, please see https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_5_Release_Notes#Upgrading_from_Mageia_4.
Those of you who prefer attempting a fresh install of the Mageia Linux operating system can download the Mageia 5 Live CDs with GNOME and KDE, Installation DVDs, or the dual-arch DVDs, all of the available for both 64-bit and 32-bit architectures, right now from Softpedia.
