OpenMandriva team proudly announced the new release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 on 16 June, 2019.
It is identical to OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 RC, which was released a month ago (12th May, 2019). It’s Code name is Nitrogen.
OpenMandriva Lx is a Linux distribution forked from Mandriva Linux. OpenMandriva Lx is a cutting edge, desktop-oriented Linux distribution, which is featuring with KDE Plasma as the default desktop environment.
OMLx 4.0 brings a number of major changes since 3.x release.
Hardware support has been improved a lot. Except usual round of driver updates, this release includes complete ports to aarch64 and armv7hnl platforms.
A RISC-V port is also in progress, but not yet ready for release.
Also, their release model has been changed staring from 4.0 release. The changes will be announced separately soon.
What’s new in OpenMandriva Lx 4.0?
- KDE Plasma has been updated to 5.15.5 (with KDE Frameworks 5.58.0, KDE Applications 19.04.2 and Qt Framework 5.12.3)
- LibreOffice has integrated with Plasma completely and working fine. Also, improved a look and feel.
- Falkon, a KDE web browser is now the default browser. It’s consuming the less memory footprint and delivering a more consistent UI. It uses the same rendering engine as Chromium.
- MP3 decoders and encoders are now included in the main distribution. Video and Audio players have also been updated.
- ISO menu has been updated with new entries for language and keyboard preference.
- KPatience card games have been included in ISO (live mode only) as per users request.
- It’s brought Systemd 242
- LLVM/clang 8.0.1
- Updated to Java 12
- LibreOffice 6.2.4
- Firefox Quantum 66.0.5
- Krita 4.2.1
- DigiKam 6.0
- Xorg 1.20.4, Mesa 19.1.0
- Calamares 3.2.7
OpenMandriva brand-name applications update:
OpenMandriva Welcome screen has been revamped and included lot of things in it.
OpenMandriva Control Center is added in the main distribution repository.
OpenMandriva Control Center replaces the dated DrakX tools
OpenMandriva Repository Management Tool (om-repo-picker), a frontend for DNF package repository selection, is now available
Dnfdragora – graphical frontend for package manager, replacement for old rpmdrake
Kuser – users and groups manager tool, replacement for old userdrake
KBackup – tool for the backup of directories or files, replacement for old draksnapshot
Calamares new features:
- Calamares is an installer framework. By design it is very customizable, in order to satisfy a wide variety of needs and use cases.
- Easy swap partition option
- Calamares log copied to successfully installed system
- Automagically removing all unused languages at the end of installation
- Calamares now checks whether system is installed in VirtualBox or in real hardware. If in real hardware it removes virtualbox unuseful packages.
How to Upgrade from OpenMandriva 3.x to OpenMandriva 4.x?
I would strongly recommend users to backup your data and perform a fresh install of the new operating system, to avoid any conflict with existing configuration settings.
Since the upgrade script is not doing the job as expected. Many users were tried to upgrading it but finally end up with some errors. Check the discussion about this in the OM Forum page.
As of today no one successfully upgraded. I will recheck and update this article when i will be getting an clear instruction about OpenMandriva 4.x upgrade from OpenMandriva 3.x.
OpenMandriva 4.0 Download Link:
You can download the latest release of OpenMandriva 4.0 by navigation to the download page.
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