[manjaro-general] Second public preview available now

Mon Jan 13 23:42:17 CET 2014

Another two weeks and there it is, our second public preview of the upcoming stable release **Manjaro 0.8.9**. We will publish **four unique graphical desktops** optimized for your needs. There will be our default **XFCE edition** everybody knows Manjaro for, an update **KDE edition** featuring turbulence, our new tool to customize your Manjaro installation and not one, but **two Openbox editions**, each designed to fit the needs of our vibrate community.

[![manjaro-xfce-089][1]][2][![manjaro-kde-089][3]][4][![manjaro-obleg-089][5]][6][![manjaro-obevo-089][7]][8]

In our **XFCE edition** we added more **XFCE 4.11** packages to refresh and optimize our default desktop we all love. Whiskermenu can now seamlessly switch users with the help of MDM display manager. We gave Manjaro settings manager a new UI to control our hardware detection tools in a more effectiv way.

The **KDE edition**, featuring **KDE 4.12**, was designed to get all Windows users a new home here at Manjaro. We gave this edition a sleak new look to match look and feel to our other editions. With turbulence you can customize your installation now even more. Everything you expect from KDE can be found on this install media.

You get **Openbox 3.5.2** now from two editions: **Legacy** and **Evolution**. Each variant targets different audiences. Legacy is designed for our geeks. You can build up everything. We ship a **bare system** with that edition, just our cli package manager added and some basic system tools. With Evolution we offer **common used applications** and **Turbulence** to change your wallpapers, choose your panel position, install additional packages and much more.

With our final release, we will also provide you with our Net-Edition, a bare system without any desktop, so you can choose which additional packages you want to install on your Manjaro system.

* * *

Lets talk about our tools and what changed with this release …

**Turbulence** started as a tool to customize various aspects of your operating system at first boot for the KDE desktop. Similar to Chakra's kapudan, written in QT and Python, Turbulence is completely unique to Manjaro. To make our openbox editions even more userfriendly, we decided to port Turbulence also to that desktop environment.

Some of it's features are:  
[![turbulence][9]][10]

  * Sleak gray graphical layout
  * Provides information of Manjaro to new users
  * Can allow the user to easily select which Folders he wants in his home directory
  * Allows users to select which theme they want for Kwin (KDE)
  * Allows users to select which wallpaper they want (KDE/Openbox)
  * Allows users to chose where to place your tint2 panel (Openbox)
  * Can also allow people to open system settings after they've ran through everything else to set any last minute details

**New features of Pamac 0.9.6**

  * Proper AUR support
  * Cleanup
  * Bugfixes

**New features in Manjaro Settings Manager**

  * MHWD support
  * added translation support
  * translated to: English, Asturian, Catalan, Czech, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Spanish, Turkish

**New features in MHWD**

  * Support for network cards

**New features in Thus - graphical installer**

  * code cleanup and restructure
  * added home dir to automatic mode
  * fixed resizing in language slide
  * fixed parted issues in advanced mode
  * added a logging message when an unknown exception is thrown in installation_process
  * added encfs for home-dir encryption: pam_encfs is needed
  * fixed GUID partition table creation in advanced
  * fixed UEFI support
  * luks and lvm in automatic mode is now enabled
  * removed backported chroot code from live-installer (old python2 code)
  * modified grub installation
  * reordered slides: language > location > check > timezone > keymap > ask > (automatic, alongside, advanced) > user_info > slides
  * fixed swap partition detection in advanced mode
  * fixed swapoff in advanced mode
  * mount source squashfs only when not already mounted
  * fixed myhomepath in partition_module
  * fixed verbose error messages
  * use 'sudo -E' directly in thus script
  * some strings got updated
  * keyboard layout generator added
  * code optimizations
  * advanced mode should detect now all supported filesystems properly
  * proper btrfs support
  * updated translations

* * *

Since our last preview we also added new packages to our repositories. Some of the are listed here …

**Package Updates**

  * Linux 3.10.26
  * Mesa 10.0.1
  * Xorg-Server 1.14.5
  * Gstreamer 1.2.2
  * LibreOffice 4.1.4
  * MHWD 0.3.1
  * libdrm 2.4.51
  * Catalyst 13.12
  * Nvidia 331.20
  * KDE 4.12
  * XFCE 4.11.2

For suggestions we are always open. Give us your feedback so Manjaro 0.8.9 will be even better than every release we did before!

kind regards and happy testing!

Phil  
_Lead Developer_

* * *

Links:  
[Download Manjaro 0.8.9 Preview2(Openbox, KDE, XFCE i686 and x86_64)][11]  
[Discuss this release in our forum][12]

   [1]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/manjaro-xfce-089-300x219.png
   [2]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/manjaro-xfce-089.png (Second public preview available now)
   [3]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/manjaro-kde-089-300x219.png
   [4]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/manjaro-kde-089.png (Second public preview available now)
   [5]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/manjaro-obleg-089-300x219.png
   [6]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/manjaro-obleg-089.png (Second public preview available now)
   [7]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/manjaro-obevo-089-300x219.png
   [8]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/manjaro-obevo-089.png (Second public preview available now)
   [9]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/turbulence-300x259.png
   [10]: http://manjaro.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/turbulence.png (Second public preview available now)
   [11]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/manjarotest/files/0.8.9/pre2/
   [12]: http://forum.manjaro.org/index.php?topic=9979.0

URL: http://manjaro.org/2014/01/13/second-public-preview-available-now/