Calculate Intro, OpenMandriva Review, and Mageia Delay

Today in Linux news Jessie Smith has a nice article on Gentoo-derivative Calculate Linux 14 in this week's Distrowatch Weekly. Linuxbsdos.com has a review of OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1, released last week. Mageia 5 Beta 1 is delayed and openSUSE 11.4 is "truly, finally dead." We have all this and more in tonight's Linux news recap.

Calculate Linux is based on Gentoo Linux, but makes it easier to get up and running. Jessie Smith gives Linux fans a nice overview and review of Calculate Linux 14, recently released, saying, "Right now I'm not sure what to think about Calculate Linux." After an interesting week using Calculate, Smith concludes, "The distribution certainly seems to be flexible and capable of completing any task thrown at it. I did run into a few bugs and the distribution was slow to boot. My overall impression of Calculate 14 was not great, but it wasn't exactly bad either."

OpenMandriva Lx 2014.1 was released last week and shipped with some important updates, so www.linuxbsdos.com took it for a test drive. It still uses much of Mandriva's old installer, but ships with new Welcome app and KDE 3.13.3. However, all is not rosy. "OpenMandriva 2014.1 is supposed to be a mostly bugfix release, but a major bug seems to have been introduced in the firewall application. It’s still a very good desktop distribution, but if you are running a previous edition, best to wait."

Mageia 5 Beta 1 is delayed due to mass package breakage, "something like 7000 packages." The new version of RPM included in Cauldron caused the breakage and packagers are working overtime to rebuild them all. As a result, Beta 1 is being postponed two week until October 14, 2014. The official development planning calendar hasn't been updated to reflect the delay as of this time, so no word if this delay will ripple throughout the remainder of the release schedule. If it does, it may be 2015 before we see the final of Mageia 5 (currently scheduled for December 19, 2014).

In other news:

* Web Software vs. Native Linux Software

* Shipping larger application icons in Fedora 22

* openSUSE 11.4 Is Now Truly, Finally Dead

* Elementary OS Freya: The Next Major Update To A Rising Linux Distro

* The Internet Is Broken, and Shellshock Is Just the Start of Our Woes