14 DAY TRIAL // Announced by the openSUSE developers a little over two years ago, the openSUSE 11.1 operating system has reached end of life (EOL) on January 13th, 2011.
The OpenSuSE developers, through Marcus Meissner, announced on January 14th the release of the final security fix for the openSUSE 11.1 Linux distribution and said there will be no more updates coming. However, a community project called "Evergreen" was already started in order to keep openSUSE 11.1 alive.
Support for openSUSE 11.1 has now been officially dropped. This means that starting with January 13th, 2011, openSUSE will stop "feeding" the openSUSE 11.1 operating system with security or critical fixes, and software updates!
"With the release of an opensc security fix on Thursday 13th January Novell has released the last update for openSUSE 11.1. openSUSE 11.1 is now officially discontinued and out of support by Novell. However, a community effort has been started to continue 11.1 maintenance under the codename of "Evergreen"." - said Marcus Meissner openSUSE’s security team leader in the official announcement.
openSUSE 11.1 users who don't want to upgrade to a newer version of the popular operating system should visit the official overview page of the Evergreen project, in order to activate and use it, and for other details. Wolfgang Rosenauer, a respected openSUSE community member, is the leader of the Evergreen project.
With this announcement, the openSUSE developers also presented some statistics about the released security patches and updates compared to the previous version. Overall, there has been a 4% decrease in the number of security updates than in the version it replaced, openSUSE 11.0, but there’s been an increase with 2% in the number of CVE’s (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures).
In less than two months, on March 10th, openSUSE 11.1 users will have the opportunity of upgrading to the upcoming openSUSE 11.4 release. The latest development version of openSUSE 11.4 can be grabbed right now from Softpedia.