Mageia-01-Alpha

Mageia Team has kept its promise and the 32 bit and 64 bit alpha version is out. It took 37 hours of downloading of 1.9 GiB with 2 seeders and I am installing the 64 bit currently.

It is sleek and has Gnome and KDE as base desktops. Custom option is active and it has LXDE and Openbox there which is welcome.

I prefer the light weight window mangers to get the speed up at boot time and run time.

It looks like it is going to install in less than 20 minutes with KDE only but 30 minutes for all Window managers.
It has done up the Mandriva a face lift in its graphic installation but features are almost similar.

I am making a running commentary and post installation configuration is fast but unable to detect hardware at boot timeguration.

Boot loader took some time and has similarity to PCLinux and it detected the other distributions in my system. Unlike PCLinux it lets you add more users but there are no language options. I was bit particular since Sinhala Linux is out and Debian is the only distribution globally supporting this facility.

It has no French which was unusual since Mandrake is based in France.

It looks as it is finding difficult to configure my USB keyboard and i will be back with you after testing after PS/2 keyboard.
I am right it could not detect the USB Keyboard but found Knoppix in a reiserfs partition which neither SuSe nor PClinux boot simce there is confusion of SATA and IDE detection and naming.
It uses uDev instead of HAL which is a trend nowadays.
Well it has problem with configuring at boot time and it is not customer ready and still a tool for testing.
Thanks Guy and Girls for trying hard.
Please include Sinhala and French too.