The first development build of the next major openSUSE release has now been made available. openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 is the first step towards the final build in March next year. In the meantime, there will be six milestone builds and two release candidates.

"openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 is available today, Thursday, September 2 for developers, testers and community members to test and participate in the development of openSUSE 11.4," openSUSE announced.

"M1 starts off openSUSE 11.4 development at a cracking pace with performance improvements in the package management network layer and version updates to major components," the announcement continue.

As you can expect from such an early build, openSUSE 11.4 Milestone is based on the very latest packages including X.Org 1.9, KDE 4.5 and GNOME 2.32 Beta 1. Incidentally, the second GNOME 2.32 beta was released earlier today.

The first milestone has some updates to the package manager. A couple of technologies should make updates a lot faster. Metalink download support enables the package manager to download the updates in blocks, from different servers.

ZSync enables it to download just the parts of a file that have actually changed meaning that download sizes should significantly drop in most cases.

The openSUSE 11.4 release schedule:

September 2nd, 2010 - Milestone 1
September 30th, 2010 - Milestone 2
November 5th, 2010 - Milestone 3
November 25th, 2010 - Milestone 4
December 16th, 2010 - Milestone 5
January 20th, 2011 - Milestone 6
February 10th, 2011 - Release Candidate 1
February 25th, 2011 - Release Candidate 2
March 10th, 2011 - Final Release

openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 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.