Mageia 3 Beta 3 Has KDE 4.10 and GNOME 3.6.3

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 3.

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 Beta 3 also comes with multiple desktop environments, including KDE 4.10 , GNOME 3.6.3, the latest LXDE, and RazorQt 0.5.1.

“Mageia 3 planning was modified to give us some more time – for one beta release more, and to enable us to hunt more bugs. We finally had to face quite a lot of them during the QA tests of beta 3 isos, and it took more time than expected to fix it,” stated the official announcement.

Highlights of Mageia 3 Beta 3:

• 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;
• Proprietary drivers and/or non-free firmware can now be installed during installation. The user will be asked whether to keep non-free packages during installation, via a simple checkbox. Moving the mouse above the media shows a description of what each contains;
• Grub2 can now be installed at the summary step and it can also be done on a partition.

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

Download Mageia 3 Beta 3 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.