The developers will have the final version ready soon

Nov 12, 2014 16:23 GMT  ·  By

Mageia, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, has been upgraded to version 5 Beta 1 and is ready for download.

The Mageia developers have been working very hard the past couple of months to release this new Beta version. They had some problems with the new RPM packages and they had to rebuild the operating system twice. The good news is that they are now on the right track and that the operating system will reach the final stable version pretty soon.

As I mentioned, the distro called Mageia started its life as a Mandriva fork and users might find it comforting that not all of the Mandriva legacy has been lost. In fact, Mageia has taken the experience of a Linux distro to new levels and its makers are still improving it tremendously.

Mageia 5 Beta 1 is a big leap forward

This latest iteration of Mageia promises a lot and it's going to bring a ton of new packages, not to mention the fact that it will feature quite a few updates as well. From a design point of view, the desktop hasn't changed all that much, but it's coming along just nicely.

"Back in September, we decided to update our package manager, RPM, to its latest upstream version 4.12. This was done shortly before our planned mass rebuild, a necessary step before the Beta where we rebuild all packages in the distribution to make sure that they are still compatible with the current state of our development stack."

"But this time, the new RPM version introduced changes that were significant enough to break a lot of core packages during the mass rebuild, and lots of packages failed to build in a chain reaction. It took a couple of weeks to fix and we were already long past the planned deadline for Mageia 5 Beta 1 (originally scheduled for the end of September)," said the devs.

The developers also add that KDE 4.14.2 has been integrated by default, the new KDE Plasma 5.x is already available in the repositories, GNOME 3.14 has been made available by default, and a lot of packages have been updated. The final version of Mageia is expected to arrive on January 31, 2015.

Check out the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download Mageia 5 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia. This is a Live CD and it should work on VirtualBox without any issues. The only problem is that users can test only the 32-bit version for now.

Mageia 5 Beta 1 (6 Images)

Mageia 5 Beta 1 desktop
Mageia 5 Beta 1 launcherMageia 5 Beta 1 system settings
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