The first release candidate of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 is now available
Phosphorous burns very hot and very fast and is the perfect name for our latest RC1 release of OpenMandriva Lx.OpenMandriva Lx 2014.0 RC1 released
This release candidate has been optimised for boot speed and you will find our latest kernel release that will ensure that you will be able to interact seamlessly with the new KDE-4.12.4 that has been included. The new kernel has the very latest scheduler as well as featuring UKSM to which one of our team have been contributing packages. UKSM is a kernel memory management tool which aims to reduce duplicate data in system memory and as a result increase the kernel responsiveness. Of particular note are some patches that partially correct a misinterpretation of the USB standard. This will improve device compatibility and ensure that device reawake properly after suspend or hibernate.
Introduced into this release is another major improvement, that is, support for UEFI booting although in it’s infancy we hope that in supporting this functionality we will allow more people to use our desktop system.
We are also pleased to announce the inclusion of the LibreOffice 4.2.3.3 office suite. This release of LibreOffice is much quicker to load that previous releases and is a major improvement over previous versions.
After a great deal of work by one member of the Cooker team Java enthusiasts among you will be happy to find the very latest Java stack and in particular the most up to date version of the Eclipse development environment (Kepler).
Our workshop team have been busy too and they have included a big surprise!!
You may be wondering why this RC candidate has been delayed; well after much internal debate we delayed the release of RC1 so that we could include KDE 4.12.4 so as to bring you the very best quality of release candidate.
Our Cooker and QA teams have been working literally night and day to root out and eradicate those nasty little black crawly things that seem to infest the dark, little used places of a distribution. We have tried to visit them all and sweep them clean but should you find any who have escaped our gaze we hope that you will report them to us quickly so we may fix them before final release.
There is not enough space here to cover all the updates and improvements that have been made but we hope you will greatly enjoy a voyage of discovery as you explore our desktop.
Presenting this RC1 we also thank all of the testers and bughunters, who work with us in one team, and without whom it would not have been possible to do the job!
Download locations are:
32 bit
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openmandriva/rc/OpenMandriva.2014.0-RC1-kde4.i586.iso
64bit:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/openmandriva/rc/OpenMandriva.2014.0-RC1-kde4.x86_64.iso
Note: the checksums are displayed in the SourceForge page (click on the info button “i”, apparent if the scripts are allowed in you browser).
Please submit bugs as usual to https://issues.openmandriva.org/
For more information please follow 2014.0 release notes .
Just to guide you to all our new features here’s a list of what to look for:-
Installer:
Functional UEFI support
Easy and intuitive install process
Kernel:
The kernel has been upgraded to 3.13.10 nrjQL – a powerful variant of the 3.13.10 kernel that has been configured with desktop system performance and responsiveness in mind. To achieve this the CPU and RCU have been configured with full preemption and boost mode, and the CK1 and BFQ patchsets have been added to provide further optimisations (including better CPU load and disk I/O schedulers, an improved memory manager using UKSM, and TuxOnIce providing suspension and hibernation services. SQUASHFS_MULTI_DECOMPRESSOR within the kernel supports the use of all available CPU’s for faster booting of Live Images
This is first kernel version we enabled two new kernel keys to test the “EDID ovverride” feature,with this we should be able to override the wrong EDID of screens with options at kernel boot,we have included EDIDBINS into the ISOs, so there are 5 firmwares for the most common resolutions the users may force different resolutions than the ones detected automatically by X
Boot process:
dracut 037 with special setup for rapid booting
systemd 208 version with latest patches from systemd-stable upstream git branch
initscripts 9.52 with support for NetworkManager
Xorg:
Updated x11-server to 1.15.1 version and Mesa to 10.1.0. bringing updated free drivers for best performance
Compose cache greatly speeds up application startup time and reduced memory usage especially in locales with large Compose tables (e.g. all UTF-8 locales)
Networking:
enabled firewalld support as a next-step in managing iptables.
support for realmd for easy and out-of-box user authentication in network environment
Artwork:
New Theme for desktop, Grub2, Plymouth, KSplash and the KDE environment. A new screensaver and user avatars.
Java:
The java stack has been fully rebuilt, and the work backported to 2014.0.
Spotlight is a fully functional eclipse 4.3.1.
KDE 4.12.4
New menu laucher – Homerun
Featuring Plasma-nm applet for easy management of network connections
Featuring Plasma-mediacenter: A new easy interface for playing your favourite media.
Featuring lastest kio-mtp for MTP support
Printing:
HPlip software updated to 3.14.3 version
CUPS software updated to 1.7.2 version
Server:
A switch from MySQL to the fully compatible Open Source MariaDB 10.0
