The next step towards Mageia 6 is here, announcing sta2

Everyone at Mageia is delighted to announce the release of our latest development milestone, our second stabilisation snapshot (sta2). We are now one step closer to the release of Mageia 6!

8 months of bug fixing and polishing

Knowing that our previous snapshot, sta1, was released in July 2016, this new development release was long overdue. We talked at length about the reasons for this delay in a previous blog post. In a few words, it can be summarized as a succession of delays due to key contributors unavailability, infrastructure issues, upstream Plasma bugs that needed some time to mature, critical partitioning bugs in the installer that kept us hard at work for months – and overall our usual quality expectations and our wish to release a stable and well-tuned product, when it’s ready.

But finally, here it is! We are elated with how sta2 turned out and expect it to go smoothly towards the release candidate and the final version in the coming weeks.

Xfce live ISO images

The big news for this release is that we are offering ISOs providing a live environment with Xfce as a replacement for our 32-bit GNOME and Plasma live ISOs. Therefore, we now provide four live ISO images: Plasma 64-bit, GNOME 64-bit, Xfce 32-bit and 64-bit.

We feel that the current lineup of ISOs covers everything that the previous one did, but also provides a lightweight alternative for older and less powerful systems, or for those that prefer a slimmer desktop environment. With the new lineup, you can see that we still have great coverage for 32/64 bit systems, and the classical or net install will allow you to install the desktop of your choice, on the architecture of your choice, with your choice of installed packages.

Package versions

Now, for the bits that you are really after! Mageia 6 sta2 ships with the following: 

• Linux Kernel 4.9.13 (current LTS)
• X.Org 1.19.1
• Plasma 5.8.5 (current LTS)
• Gnome 3.22.3
• MATE 1.16
• Cinnamon 3.2.4
• Xfce 4.12.1
• LibreOffice 5.3.1.1
• Firefox 45 ESR
• Thunderbird 45 ESR
• Chromium 56

There has been a lot of work to get Plasma integrated and working as it should. The delay has allowed for far newer versions of both Plasma 5 and KDE Applications, which greatly improved their quality.

Other major parts of the distribution have also been updated. You can see the full package list for the ISOs here. The release notes are available here, as well as the errata.

If you would like to test the new development release, you can find the ISOs here. Please bear in mind that this is a pre–release candidate, so it is not ready for production use. If you find any bugs, please report them on our Bugzilla so that they can be fixed for the final release.

If there is anything you want to discuss about the release, Mageia has appropriate mailing lists, and the full index can be seen here.

What’s up next?

The sta2 release is a point-in-time snapshot of Cauldron (in this case, dated Feb 28th). It means that work has continued on Cauldron in the meantime, and there are already great changes that you will get as updates on the installed system, among which:

• Fixed systray applets under Plasma for mgaapplet (package update tool) and net_applet (network management tool)
• Mesa 17.0.1 (This release ships with 13.0, which was the previous branch)
• PulseAudio 10, and soon FFmpeg 3.2
• Improvements and fixes to IceWM and PostgreSQL packaging

As always, if you would like to contribute to the betterment of Mageia, be it with packaging, development, QA, ISO testing, or any of the other things we do, the contribution page is a good place to start.