Mageia 6 With Codename Sta 2 is Released and Available For Download

Donald Stewart has announced the availability of the second development build of the upcoming Mageia 6. Labeled as “Sta 2” and considered a “stabilisation snapshot”, this testing build arrives eight month after the first snapshot. Besides the usual 64-bit KDE Plasma and GNOME live DVDs, this release also provides separate 32-bit and 64-bit live DVDs with Xfce

Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux formed in September 2010 by former employees and contributors to the popular French Linux distribution. Unlike Mandriva, which is a commercial entity, the Mageia project is a community project and a non-profit organisation whose goal is to develop a free Linux-based operating system.


8 months of bug fixing and polishing

Knowing that our previous snapshot, sta1, was released in July 2016, this new development release was long overdue. We talked at length about the reasons for this delay in a previous blog post. In a few words, it can be summarized as a succession of delays due to key contributors unavailability, infrastructure issues, upstream Plasma bugs that needed some time to mature, critical partitioning bugs in the installer that kept us hard at work for months – and overall our usual quality expectations and our wish to release a stable and well-tuned product, when it’s ready.

But finally, here it is! We are elated with how sta2 turned out and expect it to go smoothly towards the release candidate and the final version in the coming weeks.

Xfce live ISO images

The big news for this release is that we are offering ISOs providing a live environment with Xfce as a replacement for our 32-bit GNOME and Plasma live ISOs. Therefore, we now provide four live ISO images: Plasma 64-bit, GNOME 64-bit, Xfce 32-bit and 64-bit.

We feel that the current lineup of ISOs covers everything that the previous one did, but also provides a lightweight alternative for older and less powerful systems, or for those that prefer a slimmer desktop environment. With the new lineup, you can see that we still have great coverage for 32/64 bit systems, and the classical or net install will allow you to install the desktop of your choice, on the architecture of your choice, with your choice of installed packages.


What’s up next?

The sta2 release is a point-in-time snapshot of Cauldron (in this case, dated Feb 28th). It means that work has continued on Cauldron in the meantime, and there are already great changes that you will get as updates on the installed system, among which:

• Fixed systray applets under Plasma for mgaapplet (package update tool) and net_applet (network management tool)
• Mesa 17.0.1 (This release ships with 13.0, which was the previous branch)
• PulseAudio 10, and soon FFmpeg 3.2
• Improvements and fixes to IceWM and PostgreSQL packaging