14 DAY TRIAL // The OpenMandriva Community had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha build for their upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 3 computer operating system, a community fork of the Mandriva Linux distribution.
OpenMandriva Lx 3 Alpha brings many changes, but the most interesting one is the new version numbering. Therefore, users should be aware of the fact that the while the current stable version of OpenMandriva Lx is 2014.1, the next one will be simply named OpenMandriva Lx 3.
We remind you that there was an OpenMandriva Lx 2015.0 Alpha release a few month ago, but it looks like the team decided to drop the yearly number scheme and move to a more simplistic one that uses sequential numbers, e.g. 3, 4, 5, etc. In other words, the next stable version is OpenMandriva Lx 3 instead of OpenMandriva Lx 2015.0.
"We’ve moved to a sequential number scheme instead of our year scheme. Our packages will still show 2015.0, however," says Robert Xu on behalf of the OpenMandriva Community team. "After a long period of development and fixes, we’re happy to announce the alpha release of OpenMandriva Lx 3 (Einsteinium)."
Here's what's new in OpenMandriva Lx 3 Alpha
Dubbed Einsteinium, the first Alpha release of the OpenMandriva Lx 3 Linux distribution comes with initial UEFI support, new Calamares installer, the SDDM login manager, SMPlayer as the default media player, and the LXQt desktop environment. The development team promises to release a version with the KDE Plasma 5 desktop as well.
Under the hood, OpenMandriva Lx 3 Alpha updates numerous core components, including Linux kernel 3.18.11 LTS, systemd 219, Postfix 3.0, CUPS 2.0.2, ALSA 1.0.29, PulseAudio 6.0, X.Org Server 1.17.1, Perl 5.20.1, and Mesa 3D Graphics Library 10.5.3. The distribution also uses Python 3 by default and updates Wine, LibreOffice, Calligra, VLC, Chromium, Firefox, and other apps.
The final release of OpenMandriva Lx 3 will brings many other goodies, such as Wayland support and the latest versions of the GNOME and Xfce desktop environments. In addition, there will be a couple of alternative desktops as well, such as Hawaii and Papyros, which play nice with the next-generation Wayland display server.
Download OpenMandriva Lx 3 Alpha right now via Softpedia or directly from the OpenMandriva Community website. However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that contains unresolved issues, which will be fixed in the next milestones. Thus, we do not recommend installing it on production machines.