14 DAY TRIAL // Developers of Mageia, a fork of Mandriva Linux supported by a not-for-profit organization of recognized and elected contributors, have announced the Mageia 2 Alpha 1 release.
Mageia 2 Alpha 1 is a testing release for finding bugs, to look out for important missing packages, and most importantly a development platform for the community of Mandriva.
The developers have kindly offered 32-bit and 64-bit versions and three main graphical environments (KDE, GNOME, LXDE).
There are several big features in Mageia 2 Alpha 1, such as a smaller size of the minimal install image, Linux kernel 3.1.2 (ASPM patch to improve battery life and improved graphics for Intel hardware), and lots of exciting games.
The final version of Mageia 2 should be ready in May 2012. Until then you can download Mageia 2 Alpha 1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.