ROSA company has finished formation of a package base for the ROSA Marathon 2012 operating system. We are glad to announce the Release Candidate (RC) of the system which will be subjected to a series of final tests, but will not undergo any significant changes. ROSA Marathon 2012 RC includes the following major software components:

• Kernel 3.0.28 LTS Desktop of different editions (including support for PAE, netbooks and modern Intel processors).
• KDE 4.8.2  with enhancements and patches from ROSA (SimpleWelcome, RocketBar, Dolphin 2.0).
• ROSA Media Player.
• Klook.
• Updated drivers for Intel, NVIDIA and AMD chipsets with support for i3/i5/i7, GF6xxx and latests AMD products.
• Mesa 7.11.
• Basic support for NVIDIA Optimus technology using Bumblebee (not included in DVD, but may be installed later from the Main repository).
• NetworkManager 0.9.2.
• KnetworkManager 0.9.
• VPNPPTP 0.3.4.
• Updated and improved wizard for connecting Windows domains.
• LSB Support.
• Updated Perl/Python stack.
• Mozilla Firefox 10.0.2 LTS.
• Mozilla Thunderbird 10.0.2 LTS.
• LibreOffice 3.4.5.
• Amarok 2.5.0.

Release candidate of ROSA Marathon 2012 is available in two editions: Free (free software only) and Extended Edition (with freeware applications and components whose distribution can be restricted in some countries due to patent issues) in major European languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian. Detailed information about changes in software components, their functionality and appearance, as well as about discovered and fixed issues, will be exposed in a series of publications which will precede the final release of the product. The final release of ROSA Marathon 2012 will be presented on May 14th, 2012. Please report any issues or improvement requests to ROSA bugzilla . You can get more information about the release here. Information about known issues can be found on this page. Download  distribution.