Mageia 2 On Its Way

The Thanksgiving holiday week didn't seem to slow the Linux news any. Linux Mint is still in the headlines for stealing some of Ubuntu's thunder, openSUSE is getting rave reviews for its 12.1 release, news emerges from the Vector camp, and Mageia released an early developmental build of its upcoming version 2.

On Thanksgiving day Trish Fraser announced the first in a series of developmental release on the road to 2.0. Early details state that Linux 3.1 with the back-ported ASPM patches and updated Intel graphic drivers will form the foundation and systemd integration will be a key focus. KDE 4.7.3, GNOME 3.3.2, and updated LXDE are the desktops in this early release and a switch from Ia_Ora to Oxygen and oxygen-gtk will update the look a bit while keeping a consistent look across desktops. New artwork is to come. Full specifications can be viewed here.

Version 2 will see two more alpha releases before Beta 1 on February 21, 2012 followed by Beta 2 on March 15. A release candidate should appear around April 15 and Final is scheduled for May 3, 2012.

The live media didn't want to boot for my machine - it appears it got confused over my hard drives judging by the cryptic error messages - but, as expected, LinuxBSDos.com found little changed in Mageia's appearance at this early stage.  See this blog post if you'd like to contribute artwork to the next great-looking Mageia.