openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 5 Released

openSUSE is a community project, sponsored by Novell, and it aims to develop and maintain a general purpose Linux distribution. After taking over SUSE Linux in January 2004, Novell decided to release the SUSE Professional product as an open source project, involving the community in the development process. The initial release was a beta version of SUSE Professional 10.0, but starting with February 2007 the current stable release is known as openSUSE 10.2.

openSUSE 10.3 is currently in development. It is scheduled for release in October 2007, and it will feature 3 alpha and 3 beta releases before the first RC. Andreas Jaeger has announced the fifth alpha release of openSUSE 10.3, which is now available for testing.

Highlights:

- Linux 2.6.22 rc4
- reduced size and cleaned up dependencies of some packages
- glibc 2.6
- Emacs 22.1
- OpenOffice.Org 2.2.1 rc3
- lots of package renames and splits to create smaller systems and allow a one CD installation
- two one CD installation media: a GNOME CD and a KDE CD. Both contain a small desktop.
- user is offered to bring up network connection in order to be able to install a remote add-on product together with openSUSE, when installed from CD

There are currently several critical bugs known, to which anyone can add more when finding. Among them there would be: YaST which does not accept the default gpg key by default and asks for import during registration. The grub config is completely broken on update. No remote repository gets added during installation. The ifup/getcfg are broken, so the traditional network scripts will not work. No NIS offered during installation. The openSUSE developers' team also made a call for testing. They asked the users to test the new 1 CD GNOME and KDE installation media or the network setup at the beginning and if they could, to add remote installation sources even if installing from CD and report any malfunctions they encountered.