14 DAY TRIAL // The development team behind the Mandriva fork Mageia Linux distribution are announcing the release and general availability of the first, and probably last, point release of the Mageia 5 series.
While Mageia 6 is still in development, the current stable version of the GNU/Linux distro, Mageia 5, just got its first major maintenance update on the second day of December 2016, approximately 18 months after the release of Mageia 5. Mageia 5.1 is a respin ISO image that contains up-to-date packages and technologies.
"This release is a respin of the Mageia 5 installation and Live ISO images, based on the Mageia 5 repository and incorporating all updates to allow for an up to date installation without the need to install almost a year and a half worth of updates. It is therefore recommended for new installations and upgrades from Mageia 4," reads the announcement page.
Mageia 5 users do not need to download the Mageia 5.1 ISO image
Taking a quick look at the Mageia 5.1 release, we can notice that it's powered by the Linux 4.4.32 LTS kernel and includes various updated packages, among which we can mention the LibreOffice 4.4.7 office suite, Nvidia 367.57, 340.96 and 304.131 graphics drivers, as well as the KDE4 4.14.5 and GNOME 3.14.3 desktop environments.
However, the most exciting new feature of the Mageia 5.1 release is installation support for NVMe (NVM Express) drives, which means that if you wanted to install Mageia 5 on NVMe hardware, now you can by using the Mageia 5.1 ISO image, which is available for download for 64-bit and 32-bit platforms right now from our website.
According to the release notes, Mageia 5.1 will be supported until three months after the release of Mageia 6. Existing Mageia 5 users don't have to download the Mageia 5.1 installation medium if all they want is keep their healthy installations up to date, just make sure that you have all the updates installed on your system. But, if you want to install Mageia, you need the Mageia 5.1 ISO.