Mageia 4 Alpha 1 Brings Freshest KDE and GNOME

There have been several exciting release announcement in the last few days and three of them are from some of my favorite projects. openSUSE 13.1 Milestone 4 is out and ready for abuse and Sabayon 13.08 finally brings systemd and GNOME 3.8 to its users. But perhaps most exciting is the announcement of Mageia 4 Alpha 1.

Claire Robinson, aka MrsB, announced the first "proper alpha" of Mageia 4 and we are officially on our way. The live ISOs arrived Saturday with developmental builds of upcoming GNOME and KDE desktops. Robinson also said work has begun on implementing the accepted new features and many updated packages are already in Cauldron.

The errata list is quite short at this point, but Robinson is as always requesting testers, tests, and bug reports. There are a few boot issues, such as F3-F6 boot option menus aren't working, but there are workarounds at the errata page. Another to note is Broadcom wireless Ethernet users may have to enable Nonfree media to get the correct drivers.

As covered previously, there are some interesting feature ideas floating around the Mageia camp. AppStream didn't make the final cut, but KScreen did. The old device names (such as ethN or wlanN) are being dropped for the "more stable approach encouraged by upstream systemd." Systemd clean-up (getting Draketools to use it basically) is in the works, but the boot partition shakeup (only two supported bootloaders) is not. It appears the Mageia Welcome and New User Howto made the cut but login with keyboard didn't.

Developmental versions of KDE 4.11 and GNOME 3.9.5 are among the desktop choices, as are MATE and Cinnamon. LibreOffice 4.1.0, GIMP 2.8.6, and Firefox 23 headline the software stack. Under the hood are Linux 3.10.5, Xorg X Server 1.14.2, and GCC 4.8.2.

The desktops rarely show change at this early stage