openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 Available Now

The first beta version of openSUSE 11.0 was launched yesterday and it comes packed with some important updates, such as KDE 3.5.9, KDE 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1. Beside the updates, openSUSE 11.0 Beta comes with a professional looking installer, faster package management and installable live CDs, features that were introduced in the previous release. Below are the most important changes since Alpha 3:

• New package management solver and meta-data: the package management stack of openSUSE, libzypp, has seen constant improvements since the last release;
• 24 minutes installation: Due to changes within the installation media itself and the advances in openSUSE’s package management, an openSUSE installation is now well over 60% faster, completing in roughly just 24 minutes;
• Updated NetworkManager 0.7 SVN;
• RPM payload switch to LZMA, which will result in smaller RPM packages and faster installation of them;
• DVD uses images for installation.

But, if we take a look under the hood of this beta release, we can found:

• Linux kernel 2.6.25 RC9
• GCC 4.3.0
• PulseAudio 0.9.10
• AppArmor 2.3
• PackageKit 0.2.0
• Xen 3.2.1 RC1
• glibc 2.8 CVS
• libzypp 3.12.1

Here are some screenshots of openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1:

Images courtesy of the openSUSE Project

Developers have found some bugs, which are not fixed yet. Here is a short list with the most annoying ones:

• Changing something in the bootloader proposal causes broken menu.lst;
• Patterns or patches will never be shown as selected;
• x86_64 Live CDs do not fit on 700MB, need to be tested with DVD-R;
• GTK live installer is broken;
• live installation freezes kernel;
• License text still from 10.3;
• GDM does not start, missing gdm user. Work-around: re-install GDM.

Remember that this is a beta release and it 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

openSUSE 11.0 release schedule:

6 December 2007: openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0
17 January 2008: openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1
7 February 2008: openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2
19 March 2008: openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3
18 April 2008: openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1
2 May 2008: openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2
13 May 2008: openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3
29 May 2008: openSUSE 11.0 Release Candidate 1
12 June 2008: openSUSE 11.0 Goldmaster release (internal)
19 June 2008: openSUSE 11.0 Public release

Download and test openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia and don't forget to drop a line or two about it!

Also, the stable openSUSE 10.3 release can be downloaded right now from Softpedia.


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