Mageia 8 Beta 2 released

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crosscourt
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Mageia 8 Beta 2 released

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Look here, https://distrowatch.com/11107

I decided to give it a try. Live media was pretty large at 3.4gb but I had no issues running it and really liked what I saw. I decided to install it and had no issues on a Dell E6420 as wifi and other hardware was installed. I used the KDE version which uses KDE 5.20.4 with the 5.9 kernel. Nice selection of apps without going overboard. Clementine, VLC, LibreOffice,Firefox, k3b andGimp to name a few.
As this is a RPM based distro it uses the control center for hardware setrngs and installing/upgrading software. Be sure to go into configure media sources after install and enable the backports and tainted repos or you wont get all your codecs.
Resource usage first time was around 480mbs and the system feels quick and is very satable for a beta.
Im going to run some multimedia tests and try a few games and see how it does.
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Re: Mageia 8 Beta 2 released

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Multimedia tests went fine and games worked as well. I also want to note that Mageia uses Firefox not the ESR version and Chromium. Package manager works very well and so far I havent had any issues finding apps that I need. I added Bleachbit,Audacious,hardinfo,Htop,Thunderbird and Chromium.
Install time was relatively short and you can install directly without going into the live session.
If you want to try it, go to https://mageia.org and click on the test Mageia Beta 2 link just below the Mageia 7.1 download link on their main page.
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Re: Mageia 8 Beta 2 released

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For those of you who arent a fan of systemd Mageia does use it versus other RPM distros like PCLinuxOS that doesnt. Mageia also uses the Urpmi package manager which I like but many users prefer DNF.
I use to love Mandriva and Mageia is the closest of all the RPM distros to the feel of Mandriva.
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Re: Mageia 8 Beta 2 released

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Very impressed with this Beta 2 which feels like a final and a much better than the 7.1 version. Im already using it for normal tasks with no issues. Its quickly becoming my favorite KDE distro.
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Re: Mageia 8 Beta 2 released

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A few problems have cropped up. The laptop uses an older Geforce 8100 gpu which was freezing at different times. Changed the compositor from OpenGL 2.0 to Xrender and so far it seems to be fine. Mageia tends to default to the Nvidia drivers on install but this time it didnt and was using the Nouveau drivers. This is an issue Ive seen before with Mageia so lets see what happens.
Had some update issues which in fact appeared to be some packages that need to be installed before others but they didnt give that indication initially other than saying they it wouldnt install.
Finally they installed something that overrided my default Firefox page with a Mageia page instead.

Lets hope they fix this before they release the final.
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Re: Mageia 8 Beta 2 released

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Internet connection doesnt default to the wired connection when its connected when wifi is turned on. You end up having to turn it on which doesnt happen with all my other KDE distros. These distros default to ethernet and when thats off to wifi. When I turn the wifi off it still doesnt pickup the ethernet connection, so I turn it on. It then has an issue with keeping it turned on which varies but you get constant warnings of it deactivating then coming back on.
If youre using wifi theres no issues at all, with ethernet disconnected.
Large number of updates including the 5.10 kernel.
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Re: Mageia 8 Beta 2 released

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Solved the no boot issue with the Dell E6400. Apparently the virtualization/Direct I/O wasnt enabled in the bios and Mageia would not boot without it.
Once its on the system booted very quickly and I had no graphical issues at all. I did this to all my laptops as only a few didnt have it enab led and suddenly Mageia 8 is running great.

The freezing issue still appears to be a compositor issue and changing from OpenGL to Xrender solves it. Many of the RPM distros use Nvidia drivers by default so driver issues are somewhat rare.
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Re: Mageia 8 Beta 2 released

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Recent updates have cleaned up a lot of the issues and its become a very nice OS. If you prefer the more classic Mandriva distro look Mageia does it better than OpenMandriva while giving you an extremely up to date system.
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