The release candidate of Mageia 8 is now available for testing. The final release should be released later this month.

Announcing Mageia 8 RC1

We look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback so that we can continue working to get Mageia 8 ready for release.

Mageia 8’s new artwork has also been integrated, the community has made some really nice images, here is the new signature background, as well as the additional backgrounds that will be included.

Here are some of the major packages included in this release:               

• Kernel – 5.10.12 LTS
• glibc – 2.32
• gcc – 10.2.1
• rpm – 4.16.1.2
• Chromium – 88 (x86_64-only)   
• Firefox – 78.7 (ESR)   
• LibreOffice – 7.0.4.2   
• Plasma – 5.20.4   
• GNOME 3.38.3   
• Cinnamon 4.8.3   
• Xfce 4.16   
• Mate 1.24

PHP was recently updated to 8.0.2, therefore, feedback on PHP applications will be helpful to check for issues. The NVIDIA drivers have been switched to gl-vendor-neutral-dispatch, so MESA applications can work on such systems, with 460 series on x86_64 and 390 series still available. Note that the NVIDIA 340 series is no longer supported. DrakX, our installer, will switch supported systems to NVIDIA 390 where possible, or use the nouveau driver if they are unsupported by the newer drivers.

For Amd graphic cards based on Southern Islands family (Tahiti, Pitcairn, Oland, Verde, Hainan) and Sea Islands family (Kaveri, Bonaire, Hawaii, Kabini, Mullins) we are now defaulting to the newer amdgpudriver instead of the older Radeon, and feedback, if it works properly or not on your hardware, would be helpful.

A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the classical installation media or the .lst file for the live iso images.
For those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded  here, as always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.
The set of available ISO images is the same as in Mageia 7, offering installation media for both 32 and 64 bit systems, 64bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32bit live image for Xfce. Some of the major improvements in ISO are that our netinstall can now be used to install over Wi-Fi connections with WPA encryption. Previously, only WEP encryption was available. You can find more information in the  Release Notes.
Also, please note the issues listed in the  Errata. These are in the process of being evaluated, so updates during installation may provide fixes to a number of them. Please add online repositories when you install this RC1 and don’t forget to update after installation.
We hope that the release works well for you, but if there are issues please report them to our  Bugzilla so that we can get around to sorting them for the final release. If you want to get involved in ISO testing, packaging or any other aspect of Mageia, there is lots of information  here.
A huge hand to all of the people involved with getting this release out of the door, and to all of the testers for giving us the feedback that we need to get Mageia 8 ready.

Announcing Mageia 8 RC
Download Mageia 8 RC