Mageia 2 Inches Along with Another Alpha

Anne Nicolas announced the release of Mageia 2 Alpha 3 today. With plans of using the latest of major software packages, the alpha ships with some of the latest packages available. The release plans include KDE 4.8, GNOME 3.4, Linux 3.3, MariaDB 5.5, and systemd.

Right on time, Alpha 3 of Mageia 2 was released today. In a blog post to the Mageia Blog, Anne Nicolas announced the release as she urged users to test and report bugs. Unfortunately, it seems the live CD images are delayed a couple of days due to the Dracut migration. Dracut is a replacement for mkinitrd that will allow more flexibility when switching root partitions. Full DVD torrents and network install images are available, but no dual ISO will be coming at all this time.

I already spilled the beans about some of the other new goodies to come. One of which is systemd. According to the release notes, Mageia is "following the standardisation effort going on in other distributions." For the cautious, "The option of keeping the current init system will be offered for people who prefer to wait a little and switch with a next release."

MySQL will be removed from Mageia 2 and will be replaced by MariaDB 5.5. Developers have included a pre-release in the alpha, but are hoping to include a stable version in the final. Three version of postgresql will also be supported. Interestingly, it appears Drupal 7.10 is also included.

A new (to me) music player is mentioned. Cantata 0.1.2 is listed as shipped in the alpha. It is described as, "(yet another!) client for the music player daemon (MPD). Originally started as a fork of QtMPC, the code is now *very* different. To be true to QtMPCs origins, Cantata can be compiled with KDE support, or as a pure Qt4 application." Geez, I guess developers need to check the project page cause version 0.2.0 is out.

A lot of cool games are listed as well. Under First Person Shooters they've include:

* ioQuake3 1.36 game engine
* Quake III Arena demo (using ioquake3 engine)
* Smokin' Guns 1.0 (using ioquake3 engine)
* World of Padman 1.5 (using ioquake3 engine)
* Urban Terror 4.1.1 (using ioquake3 engine)

Well, it all sure sounds real nice. Wish I could have tested a live CD of it. Beta 1 is due February 21, so I'll get some screenshots then. Beta 2 is planned for March 15 and a release candidate is due April 10. The Final Release is scheduled for May 3.