The distribution also comes with other flavors, such as GNOME and LXDE

Dec 21, 2012 10:15 GMT  ·  By

Mageia, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and which is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, is now at version 3 Beta 1.

The developers of Mageia have implemented a great deal of new features and updates in this new version, including a new Linux kernel and systemd package.

Mageia 3 Beta 1 also comes with multiple desktop environments, including KDE 4.10 Beta 2, GNOME 3.6.2, the latest LXDE, and RazorQt 0.5.1.

Highlights of Mageia 3 Beta 1:

• The first stage of the installer will now automatically pass the right URL to stage2, if the proper conditions are met; • The installer can now be loaded from a btrfs file system; • A bug has been fixed in kmod where it would make the installer not load the right driver; • RPM has been updated to version 4.10.1, thus fixing a number of problems; • The --repackage option has been removed and the repository metadata can now be compressed with XZ instead of gzip; • The distribution is now based on Linux kernel 3.7; • OverlayFS is now available and used to build live CDs; • Perl has been upgraded from 5.14.x to 5.16.1 and all perl packages have been rebuilt and/or updated; • Ruby has been upgraded to 1.9.3, and most of the packages have been rebuilt; • Packages are now compressed as XZ instead of LZMA; • Several education related packages have been added, including Ardesia, TkGate, GanttProject, Open-Sankor,é and OpenStereo; • Support for upgrading from Mageia 2 is now available, but it might still need tweaks.

A complete list of changes, updates and new features can be found in the official announcement. Download Mageia 3 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.