More Progress for Mageia 8 – Beta 1 is available for testing

We are happy to announce the release of Mageia 8 Beta 1. After the good feedback from Alpha 1, there have been some improvements and fixes for this release, we look forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts so that we can continue to get Mageia 8 ready for release.

Here are some of the major packages included in this release:    

  • Kernel – 5.7.9
  • glibc – 2.31
  • gcc – 10.1.1
  • rpm – 4.16.0
  • Chromium – 81
  • Firefox – 78
  • LibreOffice – 6.4.5
  • Plasma – 5.19.3
  • GNOME 3.36
  • Xfce 4.15.2

A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the installation media.

For those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded here, as always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.

Image credit xkcd

The available ISO images are the same as in Mageia 7, offering installation media for both 32 and 64 bit systems, 64bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32bit live image for Xfce.

Some of the major improvements include improved ARM support, all packages have now been built for AArch64 and ARM v7, completing the transition away from Python 2 and very recent hardware support. There have been many improvements in the installer, which now has better support for F2FS and Nilfs2. Both the live and classical environments have been improved with the use of ZStd compression, this will give faster boot and installation times. There has also been considerable work with package management, rpm 4.16 has brought many improvements including automatic SSD detection and improved transaction speed, meta data parsing within urpmi has been accelerated through the use of ZStd compression, AppStream metadata use has been improved to allow better integration with GNOME and Plasma. A full list of features can improvements can be seen here.

We hope that the release works well for you, but if there are issues please report them to our Bugzilla so that we can get around to sorting them for release. If you want to get involved in ISO testing, packaging or any other aspect of Mageia, there is lots of information here.

A huge hand to all of the people involved with getting this release out of the door, and to all of the testers for giving us the feedback that we need to get Mageia 8 ready.

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24 Responses to More Progress for Mageia 8 – Beta 1 is available for testing

  1. Pingback: Mageia 8 Hits Beta with Plasma 5.19.3 and Firefox 78, Linux Kernel 5.7.9 - 9to5Linux

  2. Weghweh Hwewehwhe says:

    In the above you wrote “glib” but I think you meant “glibc”?

  3. alex sandro says:

    What about the NVidia suport ???

    • Donald Stewart says:

      There should be full nvidia support, both with free and proprietary drivers.

      What’s the issue you’re having?

      • alex sandro says:

        Proprietary driver do not work on Mageia 7. I’ve tested on 700 Series, 900 Series and 10 series.

  4. Omnio Torr says:

    Hi,

    Does this release include support for an alternate init system, like OpenRC or sysvinit?

  5. Pingback: Mageia 8 Beta 1 duyuruldu | get GNU

  6. eco2geek says:

    Why are the fonts set to “Noto Sans” by default in System Settings, when Noto Sans (or any other Noto font) isn’t installed? 🙂 (This is on the live Plasma media.) Thanks for your hard work.

  7. Pingback: Linux Weekly Roundup: Ubuntu 20.04.1, LibreOffice 7, Pinta - Aug 8, 2020

  8. Carlos Felipe Araújo says:

    Hey, Ubuntu and Mint, yes we have Chromium package

  9. Pingback: Mageia 8 beta lançado com KDE Plasma 5.19.3, Firefox 78 e Kernel 5.7.9

  10. Pingback: Mageia eight Beta 1 Linux distro now out there with KDE Plasma, GNOME, and Xfce | GREAT NEWS

  11. Pingback: Mageia 8 Beta 1 Linux Distro Now Available With KDE Plasma, GNOME, And Xfce | World Best News

  12. Pingback: This Week in Linux 112: LibreOffice 7.0, Ubuntu 20.04.1, elementary OS 6, Kdenlive, Mageia 8 & More – TuxDigital

  13. Lee says:

    Absolutely hate plasma in KDE. ALL the grafix is like kids doodles. It does not allow for different virtual desktop wallpapers on each of the multiple desktops but INSISTS that all desktops run the same stuff and none of your own allowed. Therefore I have only used Xfce as a window manager for the last three or four years. My machine is a Core i7 7700 Intel proc with 64 GiB of RAM and 10 TB of disk space driven by a good ASuS mobo thru an nVidia RTX2080 Super Black with lots of gigabytes and linux is its primary OS Xfce runs all that stuff with whipsnake fast speed and will run dozens of web pages at once with no problem and still have room for X-Plane11. Now running Mageia 7.1, Fedora 32, SuSE tumbleweed, VMware with following VMs: Win7, WinXP, Win2K, WinME, Solaris, FreeBSD. Studying C, C++, Python, Lisp, R, and others. Make good use of various spreadsheets and databases and do not need micro$$$’ chinese infiltrated crap at ALL

  14. Roko says:

    Is installation without boot loader – using efistub – possible?

    • Donald Stewart says:

      It should be, although I haven’t heard of anyone one else that’s done it. Might need some manual configuration at the end of the installation process.

  15. Roko says:

    Tryed. Not possible.
    -Installer refuse to mount ESP on /boot, complaining that /boot must not be on fat32
    -No option to NOT install grub or refind.