Now with the LXQt graphical desktop environment

Feb 14, 2015 07:01 GMT  ·  By

The third Beta of the forthcoming Mageia 5 Linux kernel-based operating system has been officially announced via Mageia’s blog on February 13, as a gift for Valentine’s Day “The release date was a close call between Friday, the 13th and Valentine’s day… but finally, Mageia 5 beta 3 is available for tests.”

According to the release notes, Mageia 5 Beta 3’s prominent feature is proper support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) systems in the 64-bit ISO images, allowing users to boot the computer operating system using either DVD64 or Live 64. The distribution is now powered by the recently released Linux 3.19 kernel.

The LXQt desktop environment has been included

KDE 4.14.3 is the default desktop environment on the KDE Live CDs and DVDs of Mageia 5 Beta 3, while KDE Plasma 5 is available in the main software repositories. Both Qt 4.8.6 and 5.4.0 GUI toolkits have been installed, along with systemd 217.8, Perl 5.20.1, MATE 1.8.0, Cinnamon 2.4.5, GNOME 3.14.3, LibreOffice 4.4, and the LXQt desktop environment.

Last but not least, it appears that Mageia 5 Beta 3 also includes some awesome games, such as 0 A.D. Alpha 17, Flightgear 3.2, Stunt Rally 2.5, UFO: Alien Invasion 2.5, Minetest 0.4.10, Valyria Tear 1.0, Tales of Maj'Eyal 1.2.4, as well as two new open-source gaming platforms that allow users to build games using the LÖVE framework (Vapor) or to install and manage games from a single interface (Lutris).

Several packages have been removed and other updated

Other updated software packages worth mentioning include RPM 4.12.0.1, the latest KDevelop, which comes with collaborative editing, as well as the educational Sugar learning platform, which has been updated to version 100. The mail-notification, task-nagios, and Metasploit software packages have been removed from this release, but they can be easily installed from the main software repositories of the distribution.

Curious to see for yourself what’s new in this brand-new Mageia 5 Beta? Download Mageia 5 Beta 3 right now from Softpedia, but keep in mind that it is not a stable version, it is full of undiscovered bugs, and it should not be deployed on production machines.

Mageia 5 Beta 3 (2 Images)

Mageia 5 Beta 3 KDE Live CD
Mageia 5 Beta 3 GNOME Live DVD
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