The openSUSE team announced last night the fourth beta version of openSUSE 11.1. The new development release, openSUSE 11.1 Beta 4, includes a few important bugfixes and some improvements in different areas. However, the most important thing to mention in this release is the full support for common fingerprint readers on the market and out-of-the-box support for many webcams, such as:

· Mediavision Pro Movie Studio
· Quickcam BW
· QuickCam Colour
· W9966CF Webcam (FlyCam Supra and others)
· CPiA
· CPiA2
· Stradis 4:2:2 MPEG-2
· Zoran ZR36057/36067
· Sony Vaio Picturebook Motion Eye
· Siemens-Nixdorf ‘Multimedia eXtension Board’
· Conexant cx23416/cx23415 MPEG encoder/decoder (aka ivtv)
· USB 3com HomeConnect (aka vicam)
· USB IBM (Xirlink) C-it Camera
· USB Konica Webcam
· USB Logitech Quickcam Messenger
· OmniVision Camera Chip
· USB W996[87]CF JPEG Dual Mode Camera
· USB OV511 Camera
· USB SE401 Camera
· USB STV680 (Pencam) Camera
· USB Philips Cameras
· ForteMedia FM801 + TEA5757 tuner

Here are the updated packages since openSUSE 11.1 Beta 3:

· Linux 2.6.27.4
· GNOME 2.24.1
· VirtualBox 2.0.4
· Mono 2.0.1
· Evolution 2.24.1
· Banshee 1.3.3

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, 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
November 3rd, 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 4 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.