Mageia 2 enters beta testing

The Mageia development team has announced the arrival of the first beta of version 2 of its Mandriva Linux community fork. This beta 1 release is aimed at developers and testers, and is based on the current stable 3.2.6 Linux kernel, which will be upgraded to Linux 3.3 before the final release.

It includes a choice of KDE SC 4.8 or an unstable development release (GNOME 3.3.x) of what will become GNOME 3.4 as the default desktop, as well as updates to the default packages, such as version 2.5 of the Amarok music player and Cantata 0.3.0. Its developers ask those testing the beta to focus on hardware detection and missing packages, noting that they are currently working on "fixing bugs and improving integration for all distribution." As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they find.

More details about the beta can be found in the release notes and on the Mageia 2 technical specifications page; a list of known problems can be found on the Errata wiki page. Mageia 2 Beta 1 is available to download for 32- and 64-bit systems from the project's site.

According to the Mageia 2 development schedule, Mageia 2 Beta 1 will be followed by a second beta on 15 March and a release candidate on 10 April; the final version is expected to arrive on 3 May 2012. The current stable release is Mageia 1.0 from June 2011.

See also:

• New roadmap for Mageia 2 published, a report from The H.
• Mandriva Linux forked into Mageia community distribution, a report from The H.

(crve)