14 DAY TRIAL // After more than a year of hard work, the Mageia development team has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the final version of the highly anticipated Mageia 5 Linux operating system.
Mageia 5 is a major release that packs a significant number of new features, starting with support for UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) machines and continuing with Btrfs being supported as a primary file system for new installations, while EXT4 remains the default one, updates to all of the included packages, as well as the usual under-the-hood improvements.
The GRUB 2 bootloader has been added but it is not enabled by default in this edition of Mageia, the kernel packages have been upgraded to the upstream Linux kernel 3.19.8, which reached end of life a few weeks ago. Also, the Oxygen GTK theme has been replaced with the standard Adwaita theme.
Support for the PPC (PowerPC), Alpha, IA64, and SPARC hardware architectures has been dropped from the installer, the RPM-based packaging management system has received many improvements and it now uses a new standard for weak dependencies, and the spec files are now less different from the ones used on other RPM-based distros, such as Fedora.
"After more than one year of development, the Mageia community is very proud to finally deliver this long-awaited release, Mageia 5. This release announcement is a big sigh of relief, an 'At last!' that comes straight from the heart of the weary – tired as one can be after long days of hard but rewarding work," says Rémi Verschelde.
GNOME 3.14, KDE 4.14.3, Cinnamon 2.4.5, MATE 1.8.0, and Xfce 4.12
Among other features, we can mention the inclusion of the paravirtual network driver for Hyper-V, the addition of a modern evdev driver for input devices, improvements for Synaptics touchpads, UIDs now starting at 1000 instead of 500, countless partitioning improvements, especially for GUID Partition Table (GPT), and better hardware support.
Additionally, numerous software packages and desktop environments have been updated, so users will now be able to use KDE 4.14.3, KDE Plasma 5.1.2, GNOME 3.14, Xfce 4.12, Cinnamon 2.4.5, Enlightenment E18, or MATE 1.8.0. Other updated software includes X.Org Server 1.16.4, GTK+ 3.14.8, LibreOffice 4.4.2.2, Mozilla Firefox 31.7.0 ESR, and Qt 5.4.0.
Mageia 5 is available for download as 32- and 64-bit installable DVD ISO images, as well as a dual-arch DVD for both 64- and 32-bit architectures, and the usual GNOME and KDE Live CDs and DVDs. For detailed upgrade instructions from Mageia 4, we recommend reading the official release notes.