Anne Nicolas announced the release of Mageia 4 Beta 2 this past weekend saying, “Lots of effort was put into fixing the remaining blocking bugs.” There are interesting new developments as well all heading for the February 1, 2014 Final release date.
One of the major new features this release is the switch from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3. Most of the “Drake” tools have been ported over and “now use more modern components and have access to all widgets.” RPM was upgraded to 4.11.1, the kernel was updated to 3.12.3, and Xorg X Server was updated from 1.13 to 1.14.4. Beta 2 also ships with KDE 4.11.3, GNOME 3.10.1, LibreOffice 4.1.3.2, Firefox 24.1, and GCC 4.8.2. Mageia 4 will also feature Kscreen, the new multi-screen management tool for KDE; a new “Newbie How-To”; and systemd device naming. Cinnamon and MATE are in repositories. There is no new artwork integrated yet, but the freeze was a month ago, so perhaps in the RC.
