A new Mageia development version is now available for download

Dec 16, 2013 07:39 GMT  ·  By

Mageia, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and that is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, is now at version 4 Beta 2.

A new development build of Mageia has been made available, featuring a large number of changes and improvements, including a new Linux kernel.

In case you forgot, Mageia is a fork of the famous Mandriva Linux distro, and its developers are trying to keep it alive through the new version.

The new Mageia 4 Beta 2 comes with a wealth of desktop environments, and a few of them have also been upgraded: KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce, RazorQt, Mate, and Cinnamon. Granted, the last couple of desktops are only available in official repositories, but users can install them at any time.

According to the announcement, most of the tools included in the OS have been upgraded from Gtk+-2 to Gtk+-3. Those tools include drak3d, drakpxelinux, drakx-finish-install, draklive-installer (the live installer), drakwizard, drakxtools, drakx (the classic installer). gurpmi, mgaonline, net_monitor, rpmdrake, transfugdrake, and userdrake.

Highlights of Mageia 4 Beta 2:

• Ellipsized partition labels are now shown (the full labels are displayed through tooltips); • RPM has been upgraded to 4.11.1. Urpmi has a new option --deploops that enables circular dependencies debugging; • All tools have been ported from deprecated usermode to polkit when needing root privileges; • syslinux has been updated to 6.02; • Mageia 4 Beta 2 ships with kernel 3.12.3; • Perl has been upgraded to 5.18.1; • The X.org server has been updated from 1.13 to 1.14.4.; • KDE 4.11.3 (stable release) has been made default.

Check out the official announcement for more details about this release. Download Mageia 4 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.