While openSUSE 11.2 has been in development for quite a while now, today the developer team has made available the first release candidate of this operating system, as it nears its November 12 due date. In it you will find the Linux kernel version 2.6.31.3, GNOME 2.28 and PulseAudio 0.9.19 and Qt 4.5.3, to name just the more important packages that have received updates.

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, the openSUSE community manager, says in the official release announcement that "As the first release candidate for openSUSE 11.2, it should be almost ready for final release. However, there still are a few remaining known issues and the purpose of the release candidate is to discover any major issues before 11.2 final. It may not be suitable for production systems, but is ready for contributors who want to help with testing and development for 11.2."

The developers requested special feedback on USB drive booting, a new feature added to openSUSE 11.2. Even if this version is tagged as a release candidate, some important bugs still exist, like repository information being lost on update, the computer not rebooting when it is issued a restart command, boot errors and graphical interface inconsistencies.

Other important updates in openSUSE 11.2 RC1:

· Postfix 2.6.1
· Bluez 4.55
· radeonhd 1.3 X.org driver
· Blender 2.49a
· Evolution 2.28
· Gnumeric 1.9.13
· KMyMoney 1.0.2
· Konversation 1.2
· SeaMonkey 2.0 RC1

For the final openSUSE 11.2 we will have to wait until the 12th of November, but in the meantime we can expect a second release candidate on October 29, and the Gold Master should be ready by November the 6th.

Download openSUSE 11.2 RC1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development 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.

You can also download the stable openSUSE 11.1 version from Softpedia.