We tried to do it and we finally release on time this second alpha for Mageia 4. This is a “real” alpha, meaning there was a lot of breakages and fun in testing. But thanks to packagers and QA team, you can now discover this new development release.
We still have a big work to do on desktop integration. Several features for Mageia 4 are about providing more desktop environments as there is a lot of movement in this area at the moment. Everybody should then find the right one for them depending on their own needs.
Now you can join the fun and test this new version:
As usual we need your tests as soon and as much as possible. The sooner we have your reports, the bigger the probability to help solve your problem!
Enjoy this new release and spread Mageia!
how about a link to the torrents for alpha 2
They are here http://www.mageia.org/4/ (which was present in the wiki page)
You really need to release an UEFI-aware distribution !! I had to (hopefully temporarily) switch to OpenSuSE because my two new laptops were preinstalled with Windows 8 and I wanted to keep it in a dual boot scheme. And I did that very reluctantly, being a veery long time user of Mandrake/Mandriva/Mageia.
IMHO, Mageia 3 should have been delayed to properly handle UEFI through grub2. Fedora and OpenSuSE manage UEFI neatly. Mageia looks superceded on that aspect, which is of upmost importance on new systems.
The alpha2 live DVD images boots in live UEFI mode using gummiboot.
The installer still need to be adapted to handle efi partitioning and installing a bootloader.
As for using grub2 to boot uefi systems, that has not been decided yet.
Personally I think grub2 is way too bloated to be used as a boot loader for such a simple task as handing over system control from uefi firmware to the kernel. Tehhnically if you can boot the kernel directly without a bootloader with a little manual work when you install a new kernel
Any solution is good for me. If grub2 is not OK, please do select a better one, this is far beyond my capabilities. What I can say though is that I spent several days trying to install Mageia 3 on my UEFI/GPT-partitioned systems to no avail. Actually, I came really close to success once, with grub available in the Windows boot menu. But anytime I changed the grub2 configuration, it would fail at the next boot.
A user should never have to do this try/failure process.
Especially when it works out of the box with the latest OpenSuSE and Fedora.
Well, at least I wasn’t forced to switch to ‘buntu ! (yuk!)
As for using grub2 to boot uefi systems, that has not been decided yet.
Personally I think grub2 is way too bloated to be used as a boot loader.
Thats your opinion grub 2 is the only bootloader i have had any success with. This single facet is the most deleterious to your acceptance. Fedora leaves you in the weeds o16bit joke on all other systems except yoursn this point. The only reason i have spent many hours labouring is ossv4 which makes all other sound systems sonicly mediocre and undesirable from my standpoint as a streaming media audio studio. pulse audio is a 16 bit joke on all other distros but yours. So i have grown to hate pulse audio due to its sdl based accomodation garbage. May be fine for mp3 on 5 dollar headphones, but i am a composer and it is an insult to my ears in my studio.
On another aspect, Gnome 3 is slowly starting to be usable through te Gnome Classic mode. So the latest version should be available. That way, both MATE and Cinammon would be made redundant. That is, at least from my own experience.
Personally, I like Gnome3, but I also like to have MATE as an alternative. It has smaller window borders and uses less energy (at least on my current system; on Mageia Gnome3 seems to be pretty efficient), and Gnome classic just doesn’t work as well as MATE.
Luckily, Mageia 4 has them all 🙂
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Apparently there is no hole-through in torrent land. Since yesterday I got no data at all
Well, I manage 4 torrent servers, and none of them is under any heavy load, so I guess either a problem at your end or your isp is filtering torrents. and I see on the tracker that there is atleast 25 seeders available right now
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I’m downloading now with Vuze. Apparently ktorrent doesn’t work for me
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drakboot should be better in the next version with better grub2 compatibility.
rpmdrake should be more responsive because it’s hard to cancel the package download. Also, if I don’t run it from terminal I couldn’t tell whether the download is progressing or not because the download window usually become blank when downloading large file.