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Monday, March 15, 2021 at 18:26

How To Install Mageia 8 (Dualboot, UEFI, and VM Methods Included)

This tutorial explains how to install Mageia 8 operating system to your computer. This will be a little bit different to installing Ubuntu as the installer requires two stages of installation separated with a restart (similar to Fedora's one). You can practice this to be normal, dualboot, or virtual machine as you wish for either 32 bit or 64 bit type of computers. Now let's go!

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Download Mageia 8

What you need and where to get it? Get Mageia 8 Live Plasma Edition. Click here to visit a collection of Mageia 8 all download links.

Preparations

Create an empty partition by at least 20GB. You can do it with GParted program inside the Mageia LiveCD.

Create a Mageia installation medium. Nowadays, a USB Flash Drive is the best medium as it is the cheapest and most reusable one. You can make it on any computer by using the program Rufus (Windows) or GNOME Disks (GNU/Linux) or Disks (MacOS). Click this tutorial to learn how to make it on Ubuntu.

1. Start Mageia Live

To start the Mageia installer you should land to the Mageia Live first: plug your Mageia medium in (CD or USB), then turn on your computer and boot the Mageia Live. Once the blue background appears, select the first option 'Boot Mageia Live' by pressing Enter.

2. Accept the initial options such as license and timezone.

- Select language English (American).
- Select Accept license and then click OK.
- Select timezone New_york (Default) and click Next.
- Select the time according to your time and click Next.
- Select the keyboard US keyboard.
- You landed to the Mageia Live Desktop and is greeted by Welcome to Mageia.

3. Start Mageia Installer

Double-click the Install Mageia logo on the desktop. It will say "This wizard will help you to install the live distribution". Go Next.

4. Do Disk Partitioning

Select Custom disk partitioning and go Next.

4.1 Create EFI partition.

[ONLY IF YOUR COMPUTER IS UEFI OTHERWISE SKIP TO THE NEXT SECTION]

Select the empty disk partition prepared.
Click CREATE button.
Make the size in MB 200.
Make the filesystem type FAT32.
Make the mount point /boot/efi.
Click OK.
The EFI partition created and the empty disk space decreased.

4.2 Create SWAP partition.

Select the empty disk space left.
Click CREATE button.
Make the size in MB 1000 (or 1GB).
Make the filesystem type SWAP.
Click OK.
The SWAP partition created and the empty disk space decreased for the 2nd time.

4.3 Create ROOT partition.

Select the empty disk space left.
Click CREATE button.
Make the size in MB as is (or simply the rest of the disk space left).
Make the filesystem type EXT4.
Make the mount point /.
Click OK.
The ROOT partition created and this will be the place of Mageia 8.
Click DONE to finish the disk partitioning.

Correct partitioning will be looking like picture below.

Notice the blue, green, and red partitions on the top side.

5. Continue, accept the options such as packages removal.

- Once DONE pressed, unused packages will be detected on screen.
- Accept everything by clicking Next.

6. The installation takes place and this needs about 15 minutes (5 minutes on virtual machine).

- The blue Mageia banner will appear on screen with a progress bar & percentage of the process being held.
- Wait until the next step appears.

7. Accept the bootloader (GRUB) placement and continue.

- Still on the Mageia Installer, it asks for GRUB placement.
- Accept everything by going Next.
- Wait for GRUB bootloader being installed to you computer.
- Select default operating system of your computer. This enables you dualboot.
- Select NO for updating online. This can be setup later anyway.
- Click Finish.
- The 1st stage of the installation finished.

8. Installation stage 1 finished, restart, and continue to the next stage.

- Shutdown your computer.
- Remove the installation medium (USB or CD).
- Turn on your computer and enter Mageia 8.
- The 2nd stage of the installation started.

9. After restarting, create a username, a password, plus an admin password too.

- Select Wired (Ethernet) from the network options and go Next.
- Click Finish.
- Create a root (administrator) password.
- Create a username. This will be you.
- Create your own password. This will be your password.
- The 2nd stage of the installation finished.

[ TIPS: it is better to use username & password pair that is easy to remember and hard to forget. ]

Installation finished completely.

10. Login to your Mageia computer.

Congratulations! Welcome to the Mageia system.

For Dualboot

You can install more than one operating system (OS) in one computer. This is called dualboot. Then, every time you fire up your computer, there is a selection screen, that says more or less "do you want to enter this one or that one?" so you can select the OS among the OSes. Mageia can be installed alongside Ubuntu or Windows or any other OS existed in your computer. To install in dualboot method, there are few things to consider:

Make sure you only touch the disk partition already prepared for Mageia and not touch existing partitions that belong to the other OS.
On the 7th step above, you can select either Mageia as your first OS or the other OS as the first one.

For Virtual Machines

You can install Mageia 8 on a virtual machine like VirtualBox, QEMU (see tutorial here), or Virtual Machine Manager (see tutorial here). There are several things to be considered:

Make sure the free disk space is sufficient where the VM disk is stored.
The installation procedures are just the same as explained above.
Mageia is available also in 32 bit architecture aside from 64 bit ones if you grabbed either the Full Installer (4GB) or Xfce Live (2GB) one instead of the Plasma Live edition.

References

https://doc.mageia.org/draklive/8/en/content/index.html

This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.