Mageia 4 A2 Playing With Updated Kernel, Systemd

The Mageia release team has graduated Mageia 4 up to an Alpha 2 status. This release is shipping with updates to the Linux kernel, systemd, and other packages, but is still relying upon GRUB Legacy by default.

The community-forked version of Mandriva has notable changes in Mageia 4 Alpha 2 of improved RAID management during installation and upgrading RPM to version 4.11.0. It's shipping with the Linux 3.10.10 kernel, systemd 206, and a fundamental change with this release is moving over to systemd's predictable network interface naming scheme. While it's bringing forth updated packages, GRUB is still the default boot-loader with GRUB2 still being just an option for end-users.

The desktops available in Mageia 4 Alpha 2 include KDE 4.11 and GNOME 3.9.11 (GNOME 3.10 pre-release) while LXDE, Razor-qt, MATE, and Cinnamon are also available.

More details on this updated test release to Mageia 4 can be found via the Wiki release notes. The final release of Mageia 4 isn't expected until February of 2014.