14 DAY TRIAL // 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 RC.
A new development build of Mageia has been made available, and as usual it packs quite a few changes and improvements.
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.
“After many nights working on remaining nasty bugs, the isos are now available in your favorite public mirrors. Thumbs up QA team for the patience and determination for a really long journey until this RC release. This was nearly the last run for the final release.”
“This Release Candidate (RC) includes lots of bug fixes on packages, hardware support, installers (both classical and live one),” reads the official announcement.
Mageia 4 RC features a lot of desktop environments, but they have stayed mostly the same from the previous Beta version: KDE, GNOME, LXDE, Xfce, RazorQt, MATE, and Cinnamon. You will only get MATE and Cinnamon from the official repositories.
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.
Other changes include a new Linux kernel, 3.12.7, systemd 208, Perl 5.18.1, Mesa 10.0.2, and the old GRUB as default (GRUB 2 is available in the repositories).
Check out the official announcement for more details about this release. Download Mageia 4 RC 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.