Linux Shorts: Mageia 3, Slackware, and Fedora 19

Here are a few short items to emerge in last few days. The Mageia squad released their release candidate. Patrick Volkerding has changed his mind about some of those version numbers for 14.1. And the fedora release team is to announce the first peek at 19 tomorrow.

Mageia 3 Release Candidate

Anne Nicolas announced Mageia 3 RC April 21 in classic installer media. The team still struggles with live images, but it looks like they're closing in on that GRUB 2 enigma. GRUB 2 can now be installed during the summary step of installation. She said, "Integration in drakboot is only partial, if you want a better GUI conf, you could use grub-customizer." UEFI support was added in Beta 4, but Secure Boot is still not supported. Mageia 3 RC features Linux 3.8.8, KDE 4.10.2, GNOME 3.6.3, and LibreOffice 4. Upgrading from Mageia 2 is supported. Be sure to check the known issues before downloading. Final release is due June 4.

Slackware Current Second Thoughts

A few days after posting the decision to downgrade several key applications in Slackware's development tree leader and founder Patrick Volkerding changed his mind. Willy Sudiarto Raharjo posted last weekend of the latest updates for 14.1 saying Volkerding decided to stay with Linux 3.8.8 despite issues to see where it goes. He expects fixes for that NVIDIA/nouveau bug he was worried about. Volkerding is also staying with the GCC 4.8.x branch after all. He thinks he can work it all out. The downgrade to Xorg 1.13.4 is still on, but 1.14.1 will be available in repos for those who would like to use it.

Fedora 19 Alpha Given the GO

Jaroslav Reznik posted late last week that Fedora 19 Alpha would be released tomorrow as rescheduled. Fedora 19 will feature things like MariaDB instead of MySQL, Scratch programming environment, optional Syslinux, systemd cron and chroot services, predictable network device names, new first boot wizard, 3D printing, and more Anaconda UI work. Fedora 19 is expected for release July 2, the next development release is due May 28.