Hi, as many of you might already be aware of, our first Mandriva Linux 2012 alpha,
has been ready for release for almost a week now, yet it only made it's way to the
public mirrors today, so with that I declare it as officially released!
Some of the highlights since the previous release Mandriva Linux 2012 Tech Preview (Bernie Lomax;) includes:
* Faster, smaller & much improved installer
* Installer text mode is now working again
* A slimmer, much improved and fixed rescue mode
* Dual arch CD iso image has been much improved with a more complete set of papckages
filling it and also LXDE now shipped with it and installed by default
* Swith to linaro's gcc 4.7 branch has been completed
* HAL has finally been put to rest for good
* KDE 4.9.0
* We're still not dead!
* fons of other updates packages and bug fixes
This release has been almost two months delayed due to a complex amount of reasons that I won't even consider getting started on going into details on why, except for the one relating to our current build system getting terminally ill.
Due to the severity of this pressing issues and the consequences rising from it, we've decided to now focus fully on migrating awat to ROSA's ABF to replace it and give us a more powerful and actively maintained build system for us to use, which in addition also will mean that we're moving closer towards more direct collaboration with ROSA again.
Once we've finished this migration, it is expected for ROSA developers to play a more active and direct role in cooker development again, which should provide us with a much needed and very welcome increase in the amount of resources and developers available to us again!
Otherwise it's worth mentioning that despite the embarassingly long delay of this alpha, our developers hasn't gotten lazy, so while our previous tech preview release received some very nice feedback on it's already very high quality, the quality of this Alpha is even higher (closer to what one would expect from a RC), while most of our most important features (from the less ambitious amount than usual, hopefully this this will be limited to 2012 release only) for the upcoming release already being in place.
Due to this we will skip the planned second alpha right ahead to the first beta release, while also most likely also skipping the third beta planned.
Following this, the final release is expected to be less than a month delayed from it's original schedule!
The roadmap with updated dates and specs is available at:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Mandriva_Li ... evelopment
With this I declare Mandriva Linux 2012 Alpha (Tenacious Underdog) as released and I wish to thank everyone who's helped on making this possible!
--
Regards,
Per Øyvind
