Mageia 3 Alpha 1

Anne Nicolas has announced that, after a brief delay, the first development build of Mageia 3 is ready for download and testing: "Mageia 3 is on the way and here is the first alpha release. We are now waiting for your tests. As usual, you will find installation DVD images and dual-architecture CD images. However, live CDs are not available. They rely on a specific file system, Unionfs, but Unionfs is not included in the upstream kernel and has to be rebuilt for every new kernel version. It seems that it does not work properly on the 3.5 kernel series. We are investigating the issue, but since Unionfs seems to be unmaintained upstream at the moment, we need to either fix it and maintain it ourselves or we need to switch to another file system like Aufs or OverlayFS." The first alpha release of Mageia 3 comes with Linux kernel 3.5.3, KDE 4.9.0, and GNOME 3.5.91. Read the release announcement and release notes for a brief feature list. Download: Mageia-3-alpha1-i586-DVD.iso (3,542MB, MD5, torrent), Mageia-3-alpha1-x86_64-DVD.iso (3,607MB, MD5, torrent).