Mageia-3-LiveDVD-GNOME-x86_64-DVD

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 DVD ISO can be used to preview the distro without first installing it on a HDD. Simply download the ISO, burn it on a DVD 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 DVD 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.

The DVD ISO can be used to install KDE4, GNOME or LXDE, i.e. these are the desktop environments available on the disc itself. The drakx installer includes the capability of adding the online Mageia repositories during the installation, which means you can install even more packages than those available on the disc.

The Mageia 2 DVD ISO exclusively contains free-open-source software, so you won't find any nonfree software on it (e.g. the nVidia or ATI proprietary graphics cards drivers or firmware for wifi cards... etc). However, as mentioned above, you can add the online repositories during the installation and you can reconfigure your hardware at the Summary stage (towards the end of the installation) to install the nonfree software needed for your hardware.

For Mageia 3 and later, you'll be given the choice to add nonfree software during install, so you won't need to take the extra steps mentioned above.

The DVD ISO comes in two editions:

i586 (32bit)
x86_64 (64bit)

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.