Mageia, a GNU/Linux-based free operating system that started its life as a fork of Mandriva Linux and is supported by a nonprofit organization of elected contributors, has just got another beta and is now ready for testing.

Mageia is a Linux distribution that distinguished itself in the past year or so with some very interesting releases, and the users expect to see the same kind of quality from the current ones as well. The developers know this and they want to provide the best experience possible, which is also the reason they had to delay this release for a short while.

The previous version of Mageia, the first Beta in the new series, arrived back in November and the makers of the distro have been very busy since then. Building an OS is not a trivial matter, and when you have a large user base, then it's all the more important to get things right, like the UEFI integration, for example.

Mageia 5 Beta 2 is finally here and shows a lot of promise

As you all well know, Mageia is powered by KDE, but there are also different other desktops available, like GNOME, LXQt, LXDE, MATE, and Cinnammon. From such a large selection it's hard not to find something worthwhile.

"After several delays the beta 2 version of Mageia 5 is finally out! But,it seems that yet again we need to postpone the Mageia 5 release. Due to various difficulties with EFI Boot , grub2 and a few other difficulties, we need a little more time. Only a few of our QA team have EFI based machines and so if you do have that equipment please test Beta 2 and report your experience," is noted on the website.

The developers also upgraded KDE to version 4.14.3, the Linux kernel has been updated to version 3.14.18, systemd is now at version 217, and GNOME sits at version 3.14.2.

Check out the official announcement for more details about this release. You can download Mageia 5 Beta 3 right now from Softpedia. This is a Live CD and it should work on VirtualBox without any issues.