The second beta version of openSUSE 11.1 was just announced, a few minutes ago, by the hard working people behind the openSUSE project. "The first beta release for 11.1 was so popular, we've decided to do it again! The openSUSE Project is happy to announce the release of openSUSE 11.1 beta 2, available for immediate download and testing." said Christoph Thiel in the official release announcement. This new development version brings GNOME 2.24, KDE 4.1.2, VirtualBox 2.0.2 and a few other improvements over the previous beta. Unfortunately, there still are no Live CDs, as they will be made available on Monday (October 6th)!

Let's take a detailed look at what exactly has changed since openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1:

· GNOME 2.24.0
· KDE 4.1.2
· VirtualBox 2.0.2
· OpenOffice.org 3.0 RC2
· Mono 2.0 RC3
· Compiz 0.7.8
· Live CDs for GNOME and KDE (coming October 6th)

Among the new technologies and applications that will be part of the final version of openSUSE 11.1, due for release on December 18th, you'll find:

· Linux kernel 2.6.27
· KDE 4.1
· KDE 3.5.10 (optional)
· GNOME 2.24
· OpenOffice.org 3.0
· Software update stack improvements, and many more...

openSUSE 11.1 release schedule:

July 24th, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Alpha 1
August 21st, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Alpha 2
September 18th, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1
October 3rd, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Beta 2
October 16th, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Beta 3
October 30th, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Beta 4
November 13th, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Release Candidate 1
November 27th, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Release Candidate 2
December 4th, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Goldmaster release (internal)
December 18th, 2008 - openSUSE 11.1 Public release

Download and test openSUSE 11.1 Beta 2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta release and should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only. Please report bugs to the openSUSE Bug Tracker.

The stable openSUSE 11.0 release can also be downloaded from Softpedia.