Mageia 3 Beta 2 Is Based on Linux Kernel 3.8 RC

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 2.

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

Mageia 3 Beta21 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 2:

• The first stage of the installer automatically passes the correct URL to stage2, if it was provided;
• The installer can now be loaded from a btrfs file system;
• A bug was fixed in kmod which would cause the installer to load an incorrect driver for some hardware due to kmod not enforcing module ordering;
• Tokenring is no longer supported;
• The installer can now write a debug file to a USB key formatted as NTFS instead of FAT;
• The installer has been updated to include the latest kernel/rpm/perl/pango/x11-server;
• Proprietary drivers and/or non-free firmware can now be installed during installation;
• Rescue will select the most recent version of Mageia when several Mageia instances have been installed;
• The --repackage option has been removed and the repository metadata can now be compressed with XZ instead of gzip;
• Mageia 3 Beta 2 still ships out with GRUB, but GRUB 2 can be tested;
• Ruby has been upgraded to 1.9.3, and most of the packages have been rebuilt;
• Perl has been upgraded to 5.16.2 and all Perl packages have been rebuilt and/or updated.

A complete list of changes, updates and new features can be found in the official announcement.

Download Mageia 3 Beta 2 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.