Last evening, February 1st, Henne Vogelsang announced that the first milestone of the upcoming openSUSE 11.3 operating system was available for testing. This first development version is distributed as a KDE4 and GNOME Live CDs for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. It contains bleeding-edge packages, such as Linux kernel 2.6.32, GNOME 2.29.5, KDE SC 4.4 RC1, Mozilla Firefox 3.6.0, Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0.1, OpenOffice.org 3.2 Beta 4, VirtualBox 3.1.0 Beta 1 and much more (see below for details)!

"This is the first step toward the next openSUSE release. The most important goal of this first milestone is to test the build interactions between newly added features in openSUSE Factory, also known as 'get the snapshot to build.' It is in no way feature complete or ready for daily usage. There is no code freeze for any component yet, so many major changes are still to come." - Henne Vogelsang said in the official release announcement.

Highlights of openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 1:

· Linux kernel 2.6.32;
· GNU C Library 2.11;
· Udev 150;
· GNOME 2.29.5;
· KDE SC 4.4 RC1;
· Mozilla Firefox 3.6.0;
· Mozilla Thunderbird 3.0.1;
· OpenOffice.org 3.2 Beta 4;
· VirtualBox 3.1.0 Beta 1;
· Abiword 2.8.1;
· Amarok 2.2.2;
· digikam 1.0.0;
· KTorrent 3.3.2;
· Transmission 1.82;
· zypper 1.2.15;
· aria2 1.8.0;
· QT 4.6.0;
· Nagios 3.2.0;
· net-snmp 5.5;
· Samba 3.4.5;
· GNU Debugger 7.0;
· CMake 2.8.0;
· openSuSE KIWI 3.95;
· clutter library 1.1.4.

openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 1 GNOME LiveCD

The openSUSE 11.3 Release Schedule:

February 1st - openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 1
February 18th - openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 2
March 4th - openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 3
March 25th - openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4
April 9th - openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 5
April 22nd - openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 6
May 21st - openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 7
June 17th - openSUSE 11.3 RC1
July 1st - openSUSE 11.3 RC2
July 15th - openSUSE 11.3 Final release

As you can notice from the release schedule above, the public release of openSUSE 11.3 should be available sometime in middle of July, and the Gold Master should be ready one week earlier.

Download openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development 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 official openSUSE Bug Tracker.