Nov 11, 2010 21:11 GMT  ·  By

Almost a week late, openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 3 is now available for testing. The preview build of the upcoming openSUSE 11.4 comes with a number of updated packages including the kernel as well as both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

A bug prevented the team from releasing the build on time, it was scheduled for November 5th. Regardless, the next milestone is still on track for a November 25th launch.

"Delayed by a week due to a critical bug that would have prevented testing, the OpenSuSE project today announces openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 3 (M3), the third of six milestone releases of what will become openSUSE 11.4," openSUSE's Will Stephenson announced.

"The bug, a crash in the software rasterizer of the Mesa OpenGL stack, was found by our automated test suite and the openSUSE XOrg developers swung into action so that KDE would work on systems without hardware acceleration, which includes most virtual machines," he explained.

"systemd, the alternative init system, becomes available for testing in M3 with version 11," he also announced.

Highlights of openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 3 (M3):

· Linux kernel 2.6.36; · GNOME 2.32 - the latest stable release of the popular desktop environment is now included; · Banshee 1.8 - with Amazon MP3 store plugin; · KDE SC 4.5.3; · Arora 0.11; · LibreOffice 3.2.99 - OpenOffice.org has been replaced; · Digikam 1.5.0; · Mono 2.8 - with support for C# 4.0.

The openSUSE 11.4 release schedule:

September 2nd, 2010 - Milestone 1 September 30th, 2010 - Milestone 2 November 11th, 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 3 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.