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.

Here are the default welcome screens when using a Mageia DVD, The first one is what you will see if you have a UEFI system, the second one is for a Legacy system: From this screen, you have access to options by pressing "e" to enter the edit mode. To come back to this screen, press either Esc key to quit without saving or press the key Ctrl or F10 to quit with saving. From this screen, it is possible to set some preferences (note that the options F1 to F6 are available only on Legacy systems): Within any of the F2 to F6 options, you can view relevant help by pressing F1 Press F2 to have the installer use a specific language for the installation. Use the arrow keys to select the language then press Enter. If needed, change the screen resolution by pressing F3 (Legacy mode only). If you experience problems with the installation, you could try modifying the default settings using the F6 Kernel Options (for UEFI systems press e instead). Default: It doesn't alter anything in the default options. Safe Settings: Priority is given to the safer options at the price of a performance detriment. No ACPI: (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface): Power management features are not used. No Local APIC: (Local Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller): CPU interrupt. Select this option if you experience system misbehaviour like a kernel panic in relation to APIC. When you select one of these entries, it modifies the default options displayed in the Boot Options line. In some Mageia releases, it may happen that the entries selected with F6 do not appear in the Boot Options line, despite this, they will in fact be applied. Pressing F1 opens a help window for various boot options. Select an item with the arrow keys and press Enter for more details or press Esc to go back to the welcome screen. The detailed view about the splash option. Press Esc or select Return to Boot Options to go back to the options list. These options can be added by hand in the Boot Options line. The help is translated in the chosen language with F2. For more information about kernel options on legacy and UEFI systems, see: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_set_up_kernel_options

The install process is divided into a number of steps, the status of which is indicated in a panel to the left of the screen. Each step has one or more screens which may also have Advanced sections with extra, less commonly required, options. Most screens have Help buttons for further details about the particular step. If at some points during the install you decide to stop the installation, it is possible to reboot, but please think twice before you do this. Once a partition has been formatted or updates have started to be installed, your computer is no longer in the same state and rebooting it could very well leave you with an unusable system. If in spite of this you are very sure rebooting is what you want, go to a text terminal by pressing the three keys Alt Ctrl F2 at the same time. After that, press Alt Ctrl Delete simultaneously to reboot.

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 not be possible. In this case it is worth trying a text mode installation. To use this press Esc at the first welcome screen and confirm with ENTER. You will be presented with a black screen with the word "boot:". Type "text" and press ENTER to continue with the installation in text mode.

If the system appeared 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 other options as necessary.

This 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.

If you converted your hard disk from basic format to dynamic format in Microsoft Windows, then it is not possible to install Mageia on this disc. To revert to a basic disk, see the Microsoft documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc776315.aspx.