Back in the mists of time we acquired a second-hand laptop and I installed DouDouLinux on it.This is a Linux distribution aimed at young children and it does achieve its aim of enabling young children to find their way around a PC without needing constant parental supervision. But time moves on and the boys are older, all have their own laptops now and the old laptop hasn’t been looked at for a couple of years.

So, over the holiday period, I started looking around for a distribution that still supported 32 bit architectures and discovered that Mageia still has a 32 bit edition which I immediately downloaded. It’s rather nice.

As with many — probably most — Linux distributions these days, the installer is graphical and takes you through the installation process quite painlessly. The only choice I really had to make was for the desktop environment, which was easy for me because I always go for Gnome. Once everything is installed, you are led through a configuration process which involves setting a root password and a main user profile, and then clicking through and accepting all of the defaults.

The installer is a little different to ones I am more used to, but it all proved to be a very painless process and one that worked well.

Many distributions now are providing a welcome screen when you boot your PC and Mageia is no exception. In this case, it’s reasonably nicely done and provides an easy way to quickly find your way around the operating system. Of course, once you have finished looking around this screen, it’s easy to disable by simply unchecking a box.

Mageia comes with a wide selection of applications that cover all of the obvious uses, and then some. While I can see that having everything available as soon as you start is useful, I have picked up my own preferences which I keep falling back to. So, helpful as all this software is, I know that I will end up replacing it with the applications I’m already used to.

And then there’s the Mageia Control Centre. This handily brings all of your administration tools together into a single application and is something about which I am still a bit ambivalent. One one hand, I can see that having everything managed by a single application is convenient. On the other hand, I have gotten used to doing things differently and, for me, the control centre feels a bit like reinventing the wheel. This is all down to personal preference, though, and I strongly suspect that, if Mageia had been the first distribution I had used, I would think it’s wonderful.

In fact, the only real gripe I have is that I had to tell the control centre not to look for CDs when doing updates. And this took all of one click.

Overall, Mageia strikes me as a solid, if unspectacular, operating system with several helpful touches. More importantly, it has helped me to revive a very old laptop.

Now all I need to do is figure out what I want to do with it.