The first Beta version of OpenMandriva Lx 2014, a fully-featured Linux desktop and server sponsored by the OpenMandriva Association, has been released and can now be tested by users.

The declared goal of OpenMandriva is to facilitate the creation, improvement, promotion, and distribution of free software and open source in general and the OpenMandriva Lx is the perfect tool to do just that.

You mustn't confuse the former Mandriva community and operating system with OpenMandriva, as they are completely separate entities. The company behind Madriva still exists, but it hasn't released anything since 2011. OpenMandriva shares some of the original values of Mandriva, but the developers have been a lot more active and they managed to release quite a few new versions until now.

“First of all, we want to thank our devoted testers and bughunters – without their support we would not have been able to accomplish this release. Great thanks and we are very much looking forward to the final result of our common work on this shiny release. So what has changed since the second 2014.0 alpha?”

“We’ve been mainly focusing on fixing the most crucial bugs for this release. That includes fixing some of the booting issues that people have been having, as well as updating some of the software,” said the developers in the announcement.

A lot of the major packages in OpenMandriva Lx have received newer versions. Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.13.6, which is part of the most recent branch released so far. It's very likely that the final build of OpenMandriva Lx will feature an even newer version.

Also, KDE has been updated to version 4.12.3, which is the latest stable release and the one with the most features, systemd has been updated to version 208, initscripts has been updated to version 9.52, megaglest has been updated to version 3.9.1, the 0 A.D. game has been updated to version 0.0.15, and the icedtea-web java plugin is now working on Mozilla Firefox.

Numerous smaller applications and other packages have been updated as well. For example, mariadb has been updated to version 10.0.9, LibreOffice 4.2.3 is finally working again, and php is now at version 5.5.10.

A complete list of changes and new features can be found in the official announcement. You can download OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 Beta right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.