Mandriva and Mageia both release alpha versions - Update

Mandriva has announced the first alpha of its 2011 edition, while Mageia, the recently created community fork of Mandriva, has also announced its first alpha, an ISO image, Cantine.

Mandriva 2011 Alpha 1 was delayed for two weeks at the start of February, when the developers released a technlogy preview for the release. Mandriva is switching to RPM5 package management and this caused some delays. The newly released Mandriva 2011 Alpha 1 features a Linux 2.6.37 kernel, with RPM 5.3.8, NetworkManager 0.8.2, KDE 4.6, GNOME 2.32.1, Xfce 4.8.0 and systemd enabled by default. On the desktop, the Chromium browser and Firefox 4 beta 11 are available, along with Wine 1.3.13. [Update]Mandriva 2011 Alpha 1 can currently be downloaded from the Mandriva mirrors in the devel/iso/2011 directory of each mirror. For example, the UK Mirror site, www.mirrorservice.org has the i586 and x86_64 ISOs (direct download) of the Alpha 1 image.[/Update]

The Mageia Alpha, Cantine, was also released on the same day and can be downloaded from a selection of mirrors for 32-bit and 64-bit Intel systems. Each image is around 2 GB. This is the first image created by the new build system set up by the project; the release notes reflect this with the note: "Mainly this is just an upgraded Mandriva 2010.1 (after all, we are a fork), you won't find many new technical things here. This alpha is (as mentioned before) mainly a test for all our systems, first of all the build system".

Both the Mandriva and Mageia releases are alpha versions and should not be used in any production situation; they are made available to enable testing and further development. For the less adventurous, the current version of Mandriva, 2010.2, is available as the Powerpack subscription version, as the Free installable desktop version (32- or 64-bit) or as Mandriva One the LiveCD version (32- or 64-bit) from the Mandriva download page .

(djwm)