The Mageia development team, through Anne Nicolas, announced a couple of days ago, July 8, that the first Alpha of the upcoming Mageia 5 Linux kernel-based operating system has been officially released and is available for download and testing from the usual places.
Mageia 5 Alpha 1 is powered by Linux kernel 3.15.2, uses systemd 208-15 as the default init system, updates the Plasma desktop to the current stable release at the time of this writing, KDE 4.13.2, and the GNOME graphical environment to the latest unstable version, 3.13.3.
Among some of the updated applications we can mention Libreoffice 4.2.4.2, Perl 5.20.0, and Qt 4.8.6. However, Mageia 5 will use Btrfs as the default filesystem, Samba 4, Drak Tools improvements, Phonon VLC as the default multimedia framework, support for 3D printers, encryption, Homerun Kicker as default application launcher in KDE, and many other cool features.
“Time has come again for ISO testing! Here is the first step towards Mageia 5. Most of your favorite software has been updated to their latest versions. There is still a long road ahead, but all in all, this first alpha is in rather good shape.”
“You can have a look at planned features for Mageia 5 for more details. Work is in progress. Stay tuned! This first development release is dedicated to our friend Thomas (aka tmb), we wish him good health and to be back soon!” Anne Nicolas said in the official announcement for Mageia 5 Alpha 1.
The development cycle will continue with a second Alpha release on August 4, 2014, the first Beta version on September 30, a second Beta on the last day of October, the Release Candidate at the end of November, and the final release of Mageia 5 on December 19, just in time for Christmas.
As usual, the distribution is available for download as two installable-only DVDs, one for the 32-bit architecture and another one for 64-bit hardware platforms, a dual-arch installable-only DVD that supports both the aforementioned instruction set architectures, as well as Live CDs and Live DVDs with the KDE and GNOME desktop environment.
via Softpedia