Mageia 3 arrives "all grown up" after two months' delay

The Mageia 3 wallpaper
Source: Mageia project

Almost two months later than initially expected, the Mageia developers have released the third major version of their Linux distribution. Mageia was originally forked from Mandriva over two and a half years ago and is now "all grown up and ready to go dancing," according to its developers. Mageia 3 updates the distribution's kernel, systemd startup tools, the six available desktop environments and a large number of included applications. The release is dedicated to long-time Mandriva contributor and Intel employee Eugeni Dodonov who died last year in a road accident.

Mageia 3 ships version 3.8.13 of the Linux kernel, which has reached its end of life as far as the kernel.org maintainers are concerned, but is still being maintained by Canonical for its Ubuntu distribution, meaning that the Mageia developers will most likely be able to adapt some of Canonical's patches to their own distribution. The latest Mageia also uses GRUB instead of GRUB2 by default, although the newer version of the boot manager is available to users who want to test it. The distribution's startup is handled by systemd 195 which comes with many of the operating system's files moved to the /usr directory, as pioneered in Fedora 17.

The Mageia logo has been subtly reworked for the occasion of the release
Source: Mageia project

Users have the choice of six desktop environments, the two default desktops available on the live CD and DVD images being GNOME 3.6 and KDE 4.10.2 – for KDE, the developers now provide a vanilla-kde4-config package that will reset the desktop's configuration to the upstream defaults. Other available desktops are LXDE 0.5.5, Xfce 4.10, Enlightenment 17 and Razor-qt 0.5.2, all of which are configured very close to the corresponding upstream releases. The developers have also cleaned up the urpmi package management system and have fixed a number of bugs relating to package downloads and installation. The underlying RPM tool has been updated to version 4.11 as well. For gaming enthusiasts, Steam for Linux is now available from the repositories.

Mageia 3 is available for download from the project's web site. Detailed information about all changes in the release and upgrade instructions are available from the release notes page on the Mageia Wiki. Another wiki page lists known issues with the release.

(fab)