Mageia 5 Beta Released 1.5 Months Late

While Mageia 5 has been in an alpha state going back several months during the summer, the beta release of this Mandriva-derived distribution has finally materialized... one and a half months later than was originally anticipated.

Mageia 5 Beta 1 is arriving so late since some stuff went wrong with their use of RPM 4.12 and the Mageia build system that caused lots of breakage. As a result, the Mageia 5 milestones have all been pushed back. Mageia 5 Beta 2 is now planned for release in mid-December, the release candidate in early January, and hopes to do the final release on 31 January.

Mageia 5 Beta 1 is powered by the Linux 3.17.2 kernel and systemd 217, ships with KDE 4.14.2 and GNOME 3.14, and offers a ton of updated packages. New to the Mageia world is work on packaging the LXQt desktop and adding support for new games / platforms: Lutris, Vapor, Stunt Rally 2.5, and many others.

Those wishing to find out more about Mageia 5 Beta 1 can read the blog announcement that covers the delays while the technical changes are mostly covered via the release notes.