The Mageia development team has announced the arrival of the first and only planned release candidate (RC) for version 2.0 of the project's Mandriva Linux community fork. At the same time, the developers also confirmed that the release date for the final version has been postponed until 22 May to give the team "enough time to manage RC reports and build the final ISOs"; the final version was originally expected to arrive on 3 May.

Based on the Linux 3.3.4 kernel, Mageia 2 RC includes a choice of GNOME 3.4.1 or KDE 4.8.2 (4.8.3 is the latest stable version) as the default desktop, as well as updates to several of the default packages. As expected at this stage of development, very few changes have taken place, as the project is focusing on fixing bugs found in the previous builds and improving the overall stability of the operating system. However, one notable change is the inclusion of a pre-release version of PulseAudio 2.0. The developers say they decided to include version 2.0 to take advantage of support for headphone jack detection in Linux 3.3, fixing a "long standing bugbear and a very visible (well audible!) problem for users" – the final release will include PulseAudio 2.0 final.

Further details about the RC, including a full list of package updates and changes, can be found in the announcement blog post and in the release notes. The release candidate for Mageia 2 is available to download for 32- and 64-bit systems from the project's site. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they find. The current stable release is Mageia 1.0 from June 2011.

See also:

(crve)