ROSA Desktop 2012 Beta Is Compatible with Windows 8

Konstantin Kochereshkin has announced yesterday, October 24th, the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta release of the upcoming Rosa Desktop 2012 Linux operating system.

ROSA Desktop 2012 Beta is here to fix the remaining bugs from the previous Alpha release and to further improve the quality of the distribution with new features and updated applications.

Introduced in the second Alpha version as experimental, the support for EFI/UEFI has now been fully integrated in the main system. Moreover, this release brings improved compatibility with Windows 8.

“ROSA team is pleased to announce a beta version of ROSA Desktop 2012 operating system. The system is ready for testing on a wide range of desktop and mobile devices. The work on ROSA Desktop 2012 is coming to an end.”

“Developers have “frozen” the main repository, performed mass rebuild of system packages to ensure their compatibility (using our own development and build system - ABF) and fixed several compatibility issues found earlier,” the official release announcement read.

Highlights of Rosa Desktop 2012 Beta:

• Complete support for EFI/UEFI;
• Added the "Install in basic mode" option to the boot menu, which will allow users to install ROSA Desktop 2012 on almost any hardware;
• Added support for hibernating;
• Faster boot times;
• Better compatibility with Microsoft Windows 8 operating system;
• Improved hardware detection;
• GRUB2’s menu is now updated automatically when a removing or installing a new kernel;
• Updated the 2Safe.com cloud storage desktop client, which has a revamped interface and numerous bug fixes;
• Fixed translations of applications to correspond with the system-wide settings selected at install time;
• Fixed incorrect rendering of various fonts;
• Fixed issues with applications that needed administrative privileges in order to be launched;
• Fixed high power consumption issues on mobile devices.


Download Rosa Desktop 2012 Beta right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.