openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4 Switches to Upstart

The most recent testing release of the popular Linux distribution, openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4, is out. Development is moving at a fast pace, so the new release comes with plenty of updated packages, but it's mainly an evolutionary build, thus there's not that much in terms of new features. There will be three more Milestone releases of openSUSE 11.3 and the final one is slated for July 15.

"The fourth of seven scheduled milestone releases for 11.3 was completed and released on schedule. Milestone 4 focuses on switching to upstart as init daemon," Andreas Jaeger wrote in the official announcement.

Highlights of openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4:

· OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 Beta1;
· NetworkManager 0.8 - better support for bluetooth and GSM;
· CUPS 1.4.2 - improved Bonjour/DNS-SD support, supply level and status reporting for network printers via SNMP;
· Mono 2.6.3;
· Python 2.6.5 RC 2;
· Samba 3.5.1.
GNOME:
· GNOME 2.30 RC (2.29.92);
· Empathy will be the default IM.
KDE:
· KDE 4.4.1;
· Amarok 2.3.0;
· k3b 2.0 RC3.
LXDE:
· PCManFM 0.9.3 and libfm 0.1.9;
· LXSession 0.4.3 - adds d-bus support.

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

openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 4 is available for download here on 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.