Mageia-3-LiveCD-GNOME-en-i586-CD

Note: Unetbootin should not be used to copy the iso image to a usb drive. To dump a Mageia installation ISO on a USB stick, you may try one of several dd-based tools.

Live ISOs can only be used to create clean installations, they cannot be used to upgrade from previous releases.

https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Installation_Media

A Live CD ISO can be used to preview the distro without first installing it on a HDD. Simply download the ISO, burn it on a CD using your favourite ISO burner (or dump it on a USB key using dd or mandriva-seed), boot the system to see how well the distro works on your machine, and optionally install Mageia on your HDD; there's an icon on the desktop to start the draklive installer.

Since a CD ISO has limited capacity, each Mageia Live ISO contains only one desktop environment (KDE4 or GNOME). Also, the limited size available means that each Live ISO will only have a particular subset of the full Distribution's languages/locales support. For this reason, when downloading one of the Live ISOs be careful to select the one that supports your language preference!

N.B. Installing a live ISO to your HDD simply copies the virtual file system of the Live ISO to your drive, along with some machine-specific configuration. For this reason, Live ISOs can only be used to create clean installations, they cannot be used to upgrade from previous releases.

https://www.mageia.org/

Mageia is a GNU/Linux-based, Free Software operating system. It is a community project, supported by a nonprofit organisation of elected contributors.

Our mission: to build great tools for people.

Further than just delivering a secure, stable and sustainable operating system, the goal is to set up a stable and trustable governance to direct collaborative projects.

To date, Mageia:
-started in September 2010 as a fork of Mandriva Linux,
-gathered hundreds of careful individuals and several companies worldwide, who coproduce the infrastructure, the distribution itself, documentation, delivery and support, using Free Software tools;
-released three major stable releases in June 2011, in May 2012 and in in May 2013.