OpenMandriva Lx ROME Technical Preview Released

Once upon a time, I hung out with the Mandrake Linux team at a Linux convention. That was back in the late 90s and things have changed quite a bit since then. Mandrake Linux is gone and, in its place, came Mandriva, which is a fusion of the Brazillian Connectiva Linux and Mandrake. From the ashes of Mandriva (which ceased being developed back in 2011) came OpenMandriva, which has since flourished.

Recently, the developers of OpenMandriva announced the latest technical preview release of their Lx ROME distribution, which is a rolling release take on the open-source operating system. One thing of note is that the developers have switched off the auto-updater tool for ROME because they’ve been making some major changes to the tool-chain/system packages in the Cooker branch. Because of this, updates are unsafe (which is why it was shut off).

So, for those who want to get a taste of what’s coming up for OpenMandriva Lx ROME, the technical preview is a great source.

The biggest changes coming to OpenMandriva Lx ROME include Python 3.11, Java 20, kernel 5.18.12 (which is a clang-built kernel), the latest KDE software (Plasma version 5.25.3), usr merge (which is a major change for the Linux file system hierarchy), BTRFS and XFS support have been restored, dnf5 and zypper are both available, and over 31,343 bug fixes have been applied.

Download a copy of the OpenMandrive Lx ROME technical preview from Sourceforge and read this official OpenMandriva blog post for more information about the preview release.