

OpenMandriva Lx 2013 inherits a number of tools from the ROSA family of distributions

Source: OpenMandriva Association

The developers at the OpenMandriva Association have released the first development version of OpenMandriva Lx 2013, the first release to take place under the governance of the new association. OpenMandriva Lx Alpha includes version 3.8.12 of the Linux kernel, a desktop based on KDE 4.10.4, and current versions of LibreOffice (4.0.3.3) and Firefox (version 21). The distribution, which in the past had been merged with the ROSA Linux code base, also includes a number of tools from the Russian ROSA Laboratory developers including version 1.6 of the ROSA Media Player (ROMP).

The last release of what used to be Mandriva Linux and has now been named OpenMandriva was the second alpha of Mandriva Linux 2012, which appeared in November 2012. OpenMandriva Lx and the development branch Cooker it is based on have undergone a large number of changes since then. The developers merged their code base with ROSA and have also been working to integrate their development processes within the new governance of the OpenMandriva Association.

While the OpenMandriva developers have been working on what is, in essence, the third alpha of their next major version, the Mandriva forks ROSA Linux and Mageia have come out with a number of releases. The latest offering from ROSA Laboratory is ROSA Desktop Fresh R1 from the start of the month and the Mageia project's third major release came out at the end of May. The OpenMandriva developers, for their part, are targeting 30 July for the beta release of OpenMandriva Lx 2013.

Users interested in testing the development version of OpenMandriva can get ISO images for i586 and x86_64 systems from the OpenMandriva download server.

(fab)