DrakX, the Mageia installer

Whether you are new to GNU-Linux or an experienced user, the Mageia installer is designed to help make your installation or upgrade as easy as possible.

The initial menu screen has various options, however the default one will start the installer, which will normally be all that you will need.

If there are problems during install, then it may be necessary to use special installation options, see the section called “Installation options”.

The installation steps

The install process is divided into [a series] of steps, which can be followed on the side panel of the screen.

Each step has one or more screens which may also have Advanced buttons with extra, less commonly required, options.

Most screens have help buttons which give further explanations about the current step.

Installation options

If the installation fails then it may be necessary to try again by using one of the extra options available by hitting the F1 key (Help) see Figure 1, “Very First Installation Welcome Screen”

This will open the following text based help.

Installation problems and possible solutions

No graphical interface
  • After the initial screen you did not reach the language selection screen. This can happen with some graphic cards and older systems. Try using low resolution by typing "vgalo" at the prompt.

  • If the hardware is very old, a graphical installation may be impossible. In this case it is worth trying a text mode installation. To use this, type text at the prompt. Note: this mode may not work in Mageia 2.

Install freezes

If the system appears to freeze during the installation, this may be a problem with hardware detection. In this case the automatic detection of hardware may be bypassed and dealt with later. To try this, type "noauto" at the prompt. This option may also be combined with the previous options if necessary.

Kernel options

These will rarely be needed, but in some cases the hardware may report the available RAM incorrectly. To specify this manually, you can use the mem=xxxM parameter, where xxx is the correct amount of RAM. e.g. "mem=256M" would specify 256MB of RAM.