The distro features Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird 16

Nov 9, 2012 00:41 GMT  ·  By

The openSUSE Project, through Will Stephenson, announced a few hours ago, November 8, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Milestone release of the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 operating system.

openSUSE 12.3 Milestone 1 is now available for testing, bringing lots of new features, updated packages and numerous bugfixes.

Sysvinit has been finally removed, and systemd is now in charge of the entire boot process. This also means a complete migration to /usr, better journal data and queries, and better support for suspend, hibernate and laptop lid switch.

"There has been lots of plumbing in the infrastructure, with most prominently the removal of SuSEconfig – the capitalization of its name should give a hint about its age."

"If you want to get a taste of the upcoming release or want to help test and develop this awesome, green Linux distribution: come and get it!" Will Stephenson said in the official release announcement.

Highlights of OpenSuSE 12.3 Milestone 1:

• Linux kernel 3.6.3; • systemd 195; • GNOME 3.6; • KDE SC 4.9.2; • Qt 4.8.3; • Mozilla Firefox 16.0.2; • Mozilla Thunderbird 16.0.2; • Binutils 2.23; • GCC 4.7.2; • Bison 2.6; • Flex 2.5.37; • Python 3.3; • Mesa 9.0; • xf86-video-intel 2.20.12; • libpng 1.5.

The openSUSE 12.3 development cycle will continue with another Milestone release, followed by a Beta version and two Release Candidates. The final release of openSUSE 12.3 will see the light of day on March 13, 2013.

Download the openSUSE 12.3 Milestone 1 KDE Live CD right now from Softpedia. Also, you can download the openSUSE 12.3 Milestone 1 GNOME Live CD and the openSUSE 12.3 Milestone 1 Installable DVD.

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.