Mageia 8 is closer and closer!

Yesterday, I was saddened by the official announcement of the death of PicarOS, the best distro for children.

Today, I read that the RC of Mageia 8 is ready for testing.

This is good. 

I am going to download it and give it a test drive.... Perhaps I will use my daughter's new Windows 10 laptop, hehe.

If my ZaReason Strata dies, I guess I will have to buy a laptop with Windows and dual-boot.  I need to practice...

 

 

First Distro Testing of 2021: OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 Argon RC

Yesterday, I read the DistroWatch announcement that OpenMandriva 4.2 RC had been released, so I decided to download it to give it a quick glimpse.

All the technicalities are found here.  To a non-technical Linux user like me, they do not say much, except for the upgraded versions of the programs I use, like Firefox, LibreOffice, etc.

I really want to see how this new release looks on my desktop, so I used the Rosa Image writer to create the live USB and ran it.  This is what I found:

1.  It does not have any problem to boot with my nagging UEFI PC.  That's great! 

 

 Notice the "rolling" text...

2.  OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 RC boots fast.  The DE was ready in the live session in around 30 seconds.  Is this what the zstandard does? The description reads "zstandard - new real-time compression algorithm, providing high compression ratios implemented in our kernel, provides faster boot- new real-time compression algorithm, providing high compression ratios implemented in our kernel, provides faster boot."  I remember the old days of Mandriva, when I had Mandriva InstantOn, which booted the computer in 30 seconds or less.

3.  Everything is working: sound, effects, USB headset, and even the WebCam (with VLC)

4.  It comes with the OM Feeling-like user interface changer, so that different users can quickly turn the DE into something that resembles Ubuntu, Windows 7, Windows 10, or Mac OS.  

 

5. You must install Firefox and GIMP because they do not come with the live version.  But Kdenlive has been upgraded to version 20.12.0!

All in all, this seems very promising!  Great job!!

UPDATE:  I also booted the live USB on my laptop and everything is running smoothly (including the wi-fi and the webcam via Kamoso). 

 

Pisi 1.0 goes RC!

This entry (in Spanish) confirms that the RC of Pisi Linux 1.0 (Izmir) is here.  Pisi RC comes as a 64 bit distro only.

It includes:

• Kernel 3.10.12
• Firefox 24
• LibreOffice 4.1.1.2
• KDE 4.11.1
• Latest versions of lots of free software packages
• Several languages available (also for installation)

It requires a minimum of 10GB to install it to a VM (VirtualBox).

A clean install is recommended and the repositories are found here.

The final release is closer.  Kudos to the developers and thank you for their tireless effort.  The dream is alive!

Coming Soon: Pisi 1.0 RC!

According to this post by Yoyo (in Spanish), the release candidate of Pisi Linux 1.0 is close.  For those who might not know, Pisi Linux is the fork of Pardus Linux.

This release candidate will bring:

• - Kernel 3.10.x
• - KDE 4.11.1
• - Mesa 9.2
• - Latest bug fixes
• - Updated software
• - More…

I am very excited because of the news.  As the beta 1 of this distro has been performing very well on my laptop computer, I am eager to see what a more polished release will bring. 


For the time being... Congratulations to all the developing team!

Busy weekend with Mageia, LibreOffice, and Liberté

After an intense week, I decided to forget about work this weekend and have some time for my hobby, software testing.  So, I downloaded Mageia 2 RC, LibreOffice 3.4.5, and a Linux distro that I had never heard of: Liberté 2012.1.

Mageia 2 RC
I upgraded my Mageia 2 Beta 3 VirtualMachine and... absolutely nothing happened.  Before some hasty conclusions, I mean NOTHING BAD happened; all my software works, even the Japanese IME with iBus. I guess I will wait until they release the final version to try it on real hardware and to see if my netbook works better with Mageia 2 or if I should keep the previous release.

LibreOffice
I had a previous version, so I upgraded it to have the cool OpenGL effects.  However, I was impressed the most by the great PDF editing feature: with an office suite that can edit PDFs as easily as any other ODF document, MSOffice looks like a real software dinosaur.

The only drawback is that I have not figured out how to enable SCIM to work with it, so I must keep OpenOffice in my Mandriva 2010.2 box to type in Japanese.

Liberté
I must confess that I felt a little anxious about downloading a distro that is so anonymous that even its origin remains undisclosed in DistroWatch.  However, as it is 210MB, I gave it a try.  It enabled Tor and booted without any problem.  Web browsing is done with Gnome Browser.  Liberté includes Abiword for document production and Pidgin as the IM client.  There was no GIMP for image-editing software, which is logical because the purpose of this distro is private communication.  The best part for me is that this distro boots an IME in live mode that includes Anthy for Japanese writing and it works flawlessly with Abiword.  Vive la Liberté !

In my humble opinion, the three of them are promising.

Now I'm downloading the final release of ROSA Marathon...

A quick look at ROSA Marathon EE RC

It's no secret; Mandriva S.A. faced difficult times and improving the company's poor interaction with the community is the latest goal they have established.  In the meantime, developers, users, and forum admins have gone (Farewell, Germ, and thanks for all of your work!).

As a Mandriva user, I am concerned because I would not like this beautiful distro to disappear.  However, I haven't heard of a new Mandriva release soon.  Mageia and ROSA, the two divergent lines of the continuity of Mandriva Linux, are buzzing with activity.  For the ones who are not informed, while Mageia 1 kept the line of Mandriva 2010.2, ROSA is intending to keep the line of Mandriva Desktop 2011.

When Mageia 2 Beta 3 made its appearance in the Linux landscape, I tested it and was satisfied by its new look and use of KDE.  In addition, the Japanese IME was working flawlessly, so I was very pleased there even if multimedia needed some tweaking to run properly.

ROSA, on the other hand, has unveiled its new release candidate of Marathon EE (EE is the version including non-free stuff, like the extinct Mandriva ONE). I downloaded, gave it a run in Live mode, and this is what I found:

ROSA presents some animated bars as the Live environment is becoming ready to launch.  After a while of waiting (the wait was shorter than with Mandriva Desktop 2011, I must say), you are greeted by this desktop:

It is very responsive for a Live CD and the Spanish localization is very good.  The most obvious change is the indicator of the KDE desktop.  When you clic on the ROSA button, you see the well-too familiar ROSA launcher and SIMPLE WELCOME found also in Mandriva 2011:

You have a ROSA sync icon, but I noticed the lack of software for a distro this size.  I mean, you get a full LibreOffice suite, but in graphics or multimedia, the options are scarce.  However, the ROSA player is promising:

The ROSA player works well with mpg and avi video but, when playing mp4's or flv's, there was no sound although it displayed the video.  This was curious because YouTube worked fine out of the box.

ROSA Marathon EE also recognizes and mounts all the partitions on the hard drive in Live mode.

On a different note, the Mandriva influence is visible.  For example, to configure the system, you type MCC (Mandriva Control Center), not RCC, and the ROSA control center opens:

You can also see the "M" in the icon ;-)

Overall, I think that this is a heavy system, but it is beautiful and usable for newbies.  ROSa is beggining to capture some attention in the world of Linux, too, as seen by its quick moving up in the DistroWatch chart.  I wonder if there is a ROSA community, though.

Now I will wait for the Mageia 2 RC to run a comparison.