14 DAY TRIAL // The fourth development release of the upcoming openSUSE 11.4 has been released. The latest milestone comes with quite a few updated packages, including some big ones like an updated kernel and KDE SC 4.6 beta, to be expected from an early development release.
"The OpenSuSE project released the fourth of six milestones in the development of openSUSE 11.4. Milestone 4 (M4) brings a wide range of updates, both major and minor," SUSE's Will Stephenson announced.
"Kernel 2.6.37rc3 is the basis of M4, including the famous '200 line' per tty task groups patch to improve desktop interactivity, and featuring the removal of the so-called 'Big Kernel Lock' that will improve scalability," he explained.
"NetworkManager was updated to 0.8.2, seeing several last minute fixes in cooperation with upstream developers," he added. "Libzypp 8.8 adds support for metalinks, the multiple download URL specification," he also said.
Regular users should be more excited about the new KDE SC 4.6 beta 1 now included in openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 4. KDE SC 4.6 is still under development and is scheduled to land sometime in late January 2011.
Since openSUSE 11.4 won't be available until March, a stable build of KDE SC 4.6 should be ready by then. On the GNOME front there's not much news, GNOME 2.32.2, the latest stable release from a couple of months ago, is the one shipping with openSUSE 11.4.
Highlights of openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 4 (M4):
· Linux kernel 2.6.37 rc3; · KDE SC 4.6 beta 1; · GNOME 2.32.2; · NetworkManager 0.8.2; · Libzypp 8.8; · Zeitgeist 0.6; · KOffice 2.3 beta 1; · LibreOffice replaces OpenOffice.org;
The openSUSE 11.4 release schedule:
September 2nd, 2010 - Milestone 1
September 30th, 2010 - Milestone 2
November 11th, 2010 - Milestone 3
November 29th, 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 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.