Second Mageia 3 beta ships LibreOffice 4 release candidate

After a delay of a week and some problems during development, the Mageia developers have released the second beta of Mageia 3. In the release announcement, the developers describe the process as "a real release full of server failures and bugs" and are calling on users to give them feedback on the drivers for Broadcom wireless chipsets. Mageia 3 Beta 2 also includes the latest RC2 release of LibreOffice 4.0 from last week.

The developers have removed all proprietary drivers for Broadcom devices in a push to test the open source alternatives. If the new drivers are breaking too many things for too many users, the old drivers will be reinstated before the final release of Mageia 3 is shipped. Calling testing at this point "essential", the developers ask users to test the release as much as possible and submit bug reports through the project's Bugzilla instance.

Mageia 3 beta 2 is available for download for 32- and 64-bit systems from the project's web site. According to the current development schedule, a Beta 3 release is expected in February with a release candidate of Mageia 3 being planned for March. The final release of Mageia 3 is scheduled for 2 April.

(fab)