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Here is the second beta of Mageia 3 (released January 25th, 2013) This is beta software. This means it is not:

  • for daily use;
  • for any kind of production use;
  • to be used as a basis for any reviews.

It is a test release to find bugs and identify essential missing packages. It serves as a platform for further development leading to the RC stage, and the official release planned for April 2013. More info about Mageia 3 development.

Download

This release can be downloaded from a mirror of your choice at http://mirrors.mageia.org/ in torrents or directly from http://www.mageia.org/3/

Classic installer

  • 2 DVDs 32 and 64 bit
    • Mageia-3-beta2-i586-DVD.iso
      • md5: d8e9dfa5d7f4741d1e55fd49754564fb
      • sha1: 752a1a67a15ceaa8c3c28c8d724fd07b9a756224
    • Mageia-3-beta2-x86_64-DVD.iso
      • md5: 4fac433fe6ed90a487c875a8ed2a6740
      • sha1: 6260c0311be8d1185e35bba72be28be79230c816
    • 100% free software inside, classic installer
    • 3 main graphical environments (KDE, GNOME, LXDE)
    • content will be added in coming release depending on reports
  • No dual arch CD; this will be available for the next release.

Live

Mageia 3 will provide a new set of Live images:

  • 2 Live CDs 32-bit: English-only
    • Mageia-3-beta2-LiveCD-GNOME-en-i586-CD.iso
      • md5: ddc5d6ef404e8e202fee90e2f0b85e4c
      • sha1: 4bafd4114121e289c50ba88225848815ef74b224
    • Mageia-3-beta2-LiveCD-KDE4-en-i586-CD.iso
      • md5: 7f4caaee6cd7fe7c8477ccb8fed489cc
      • sha1: 082b9f551a749f7b4afc84903e6cc25843251b92
  • 4 LiveDVDs (32 and 64 bit) multi-lingual
    • Mageia-3-beta2-LiveDVD-GNOME-i586-DVD.iso
      • md5: abe531ffe62934ddac4bb2c47529ed6f
      • sha1: 36ba594ea27f3a8173b91e6233ffd0b9d2207232
    • Mageia-3-beta2-LiveDVD-KDE4-i586-DVD.iso
      • md5: f75e8cd97dc6eeb4fc10983d513a84b5
      • sha1: af6171a367752282f5493beaf74418302cb39ef3
    • Mageia-3-beta2-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD.iso
      • md5: 92b4e46d19e77df32e875027043c9af5
      • sha1: c9a90e5d64f6e883b0af302fedeec64270944a0e
    • Mageia-3-beta2-LiveDVD-KDE4-x86_64-DVD.iso
      • md5: 92ab494006975b58cc1f195dee36787d
      • sha1:4835f94f7a995c4cb369a5d73c78bc518f23cbe2

Major new features

Installation

Stage 1

The first stage of the installer automatically passes the correct URL to stage2 if it was provided. eg http://foobar.com/mirrors/mageia/cauldron/ instead of http://foobar.com/mirrors/mageia/cauldron/x86_64

The installer can now be loaded from a btrfs file system.

A bug was fixed in kmod which would cause the installer to load an incorrect driver for some hardware due to kmod not enforcing module ordering (mga#5833).

Stage 2

  • Tokenring is no longer supported.
  • The installer can now write a debug file to a USB key formatted as NTFS instead of FAT (mga#5685).
  • Resizing NTFS works again (it was broken by the switch from ntfsprogs to ntfs-3g)
  • The installer has been updated to include the latest kernel/rpm/perl/pango/x11-server.
  • An "unselect all" button has been added when one chooses to pick package groups, allowing a faster minimal installation.
  • Proprietary drivers and/or non-free firmware can now be installed during installation. The user is be asked whether to keep non-free packages during installation via a simple checkbox. Moving the mouse above the media shows a description of what each contains.
  • Grub2 can now be installed at the summary step. This is only initial integration. Also, please keep in mind that for now grub2 should only be installed in MBR; do not forget to change this in the grub2 configuration tool on the next screen.

Debugging

It's now possible to rebuild stage 1 & stage 2 packages with a debug option in order to have better environments for debugging the installer.

Rescue

Rescue will select the most recent version of Mageia when several Mageia instances have been installed.

Package management

RPM has been upgraded to 4.11 beta.

Urpmi has been refactored and cleaned. Various bugs have been fixed :

  • urpmi used to download noarch packages twice when using --download-all option on 64-bit machines because they are in both 32 and 64-bit repositories (mga#4867)
  • urpmf and urpmq now work as user with the --use-distrib option (mga#1225)
  • gurpmi:
    • gurpmi will upgrade glib, gtk & perl-{Glib,Gtk2} bindings as priority upgrades prior to restart (mga#5066)
    • gurpmi now wraps some huge debug messages add uses a scrollbar in such cases (mga#5118)

API change

The --repackage option has been removed (it had not worked since rpm-4.6 was introduced in 2009). Repository metadata can now be compressed with XZ instead of gzip.

Security

Urpmi will now warn

  • when a medium has no signing key;
  • about unsigned packages from media without signing keys;
  • when signature checking is disabled per medium.

The "download-all" option is supported in urpmi.cfg as opposed to being available only from the command line.

Graphical package manager

Rpmdrake wasn't properly highlighting latest changes in package changelogs when they used Epoch. Updates were sometimes wrongly deselected when clicking on "New dependencies". The --merge-all-rpmnew option is slightly faster.

Base system

kernel

  • Mageia 3 Beta 2 ships with kernel 3.8

systemd

GRUB

  • Mageia 3 Beta 2 still comes with GRUB as a default. But you can test GRUB2.
    Initial integration is now available in installer and drakxtools.

File systems

  • OverlayFS is now available and used to build live CDs

Perl

  • Perl has been upgraded to 5.16.2 and all perl packages have been rebuilt and/or updated

Ruby

  • Ruby has been upgraded to 1.9.3, and most of the packages have been rebuilt.

journalctl

  • To complete

Others

  • /usr move main goal is to provide an easy way to mount most of the installed operating system files read-only during normal usage.

Also make it easy to take snapshots (when combined with btrfs or lvm) or share it over the network.

Packaging

Package compression

Packages are now compressed as XZ instead of LZMA

Easier debugging

By default, minimal debuginfo is installed in order to increase the quality of bug reports and allow easier support for profiling and userspace tracing. Developers will receive better bug reports by default, without users having to enable debug media and install big debug packages.

It will also make system-wide profiling, userspace dynamic probes and casual debugging easier.

RPM groups

The groups in which Mageia packages have been redesigned to ease browsing in rpmdrake and during installation. The new organisation is meant to be more clear and efficient.

Mass rebuild

Mass rebuild has been completed. The 10,500 source packages were rebuilt in three days on four nodes. Thanks to our packager, we are close to having 100% rebuild success. (Don't be afraid of the 500 'new packages' in two days that you can see in this last URL, they were due to a buildtest bug which doesn't affect the official one ;) )

This will improve the quality of Mageia 3 and also post-product support (bug or security updates), won't need to spend time fixing stuff that should already work.

Graphical environments

KDE

KDE 4.9.97 (rc2 of kde 4.10) is now available in beta 2.

Qt 4.8.4

Qt 5

QtCreator 2.6.1

GNOME

GNOME environment is also provided. Currently 3.6.2, 3.6.

LXDE

XFCE

4.10

(available at install in the 'other desktop' checkbox with the classical one since this beta2)

RazorQt

Beta 2 comes with RazorQt v. 0.5.1: "Razor-qt is an advanced, easy-to-use, and fast desktop environment based on Qt technologies. It has been tailored for users who value simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface. Unlike most desktop environments, Razor-qt also works fine with weak machines".

Office apps

Games

Steam for linux is now available in the repositories.

Education

Software Development

Artwork and design

New artwork has not yet been integrated at this early stage of Mageia 3.

Upgrading from Mageia 2

The ability to perform an automated upgrade from Mageia 2 is now available, but may still need tweaking. Some news

Known issues

See Errata page

Tests wanted!

If not done yet, you can confirm or invalidate the currently reported (by the QA or other people) bugs: (see here or here a more complete list )

Bug reporting

You can find our bugzilla here, but please read the Errata before reporting any bugs. If you don't already have a Mageia account, you can create one at https://identity.mageia.org/. If you don't know how the procedure works, please read how to report a bug first.