Initial release of Mandriva fork Mageia is still on track for release later this month. Numerous preparations continue behind the scenes to facilitate this highly anticipated release.

A previous report of an earlier packagers' meeting outlined some of the procedures and personnel in place and still needed to begin the process of building Mageia software. Hardware and temporary hosting was secured and the build system was being implemented. In a more recent blog posting, Mageia representatives stated that "packaging tasks have been launched." While the build system isn't fully operational, the first 40 packages are expected in the coming days as letters describing the SVN upload process, which is ready, have been sent. Mentors are being paired with new developers who did not previously have an account so they can begin their work as well.

The same post stated that the migration to permanent Web hosting isn't complete as of yet. The holidays contributed to the lag, but progress moving "Bugzilla, www, maintainers, account management, calendar, code repositories" is slowly being made. Completion is expected this month.

Despite running a bit behind, founders do not anticipate a delay in announcing their initial technical release. Alpha 0, as it is being called, is still on track for sometime in January. Anne Nicolas warns that it is just that - an alpha. She said, "things will be way more interesting in the coming months." The alpha was previously described as "Mandriva with the branding removed." From there Mageia is expected to diverge from Mandriva and slowly build its own identity.

In other Mageia news, it was announced that "Mageia.org has just joined Open Invention Network as a licensee." OIN was formed to help protect and share patents held by Linux members and to defend against patent infringement allegations from outside the Linux sphere. Many projects have joined OIN, either as members or licensees, to further this cause. Some include Novell, GNOME, Canonical, Red Hat, Mozilla, and KDE.