Mageia 3 Beta 3, the delayed beta release that pushed Mageia 3's release date into May, has now been released by the development team. The team say they had to face quite a lot of bugs during the QA phase of testing the beta 3 ISO images and that it took more time than expected to fix them. Another beta, beta 4 is scheduled for 28 March, followed by a release freeze on 7 April, release candidate on 19 April, and final release on 3 May.

Mageia 3 Beta 3 is shipping with a version 3.8.1 Linux kernel and systemd 195. Despite GRUB2 support being available for test, Beta 3 still ships with GRUB as a default boot loader. It also includes KDE 4.10, GNOME 3.6.3 and XFCE 4.10, and the release version of LibreOffice 4.0. Steam for Linux is available from the Mageia repositories. The developers have completed the "/usr move", which moves many executables and libraries from under / to /usr; a process inspired by the Fedora developers' move.

Further details of the changes in Mageia 3 Beta 3 are in the release notes and errata. LiveCD and LiveDVD images for KDE and GNOME desktops are available to download along with a network installer image. ISOs for the "classical installer" will be released shortly according to the Mageia team. The beta 3 release is designed solely for testing and not for production use.

(djwm)