Issue #48 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!
In this week’s issue:

• Development Release: openSUSE 11.1 RC 1 Now Available
• Joe Brockmeier: YaST Mascot Winner Chosen! Say Hello to Yastie!
• Ben Martin: Debug your shell scripts with bashdb
• Lluis Sanchez: MonoDevelop 2.0 alpha 2 is out
• Susegeek.com: Linux Kernel Magic SysRq keys in openSUSE for crash recovery

The openSUSE Weekly News is available in:
German,
Indonesian,
Japanese,
Polish (NEW!),
Portuguese and
Russian,
Spanish (delay).

Meeting page

The openSUSE Project is happy to announce that openSUSE 11.1 RC 1 is now available. If all goes well, this will be the last testing release before the final 11.1 public release on December 18th.

This release includes a number of bugfixes and changes since 11.1 beta 5, as well as a new license.

Digg it! http://digg.com/linux_unix/Development_Release_openSUSE_11_1_RC_1_Now_Available

Call for Testing

We all want openSUSE 11.1 to be the best release yet, and we need your help to get there. This release is ready for widespread testing, and we’re encouraging everyone to download and work with the testing releases to find any critical bugs before release. Please run the release through your usual routine, and let us know about any bugs or other issues that you find.

Remember that this is a release candidate, and is not suitable for use on production systems, however. Though many openSUSE users can and do use the Factory distribution and/or testing releases for day-to-day work we want to stress that it’s entirely possible that you will encounter serious bugs.

See openSUSE.org/Testing for more information on Testing.

To follow the testing and development process, we suggest that you subscribe to the openSUSE-Factory mailing list, and join the #openSUSE-Factory channel on Freenode to discuss openSUSE development.

What’s changed since beta 5?

Major changes in this release include:

* A new, shorter distro license
* Linux kernel 2.6.27.7
* glibc 2.9
* Additional translations
* Amarok 2.0 RC 1
* Zypper 1.0.1

See the Factory News page for changes in the Factory distribution between release announcements. DistroWatch also carries an expanded list of packages being shipped in the Factory distribution.

Media and Download

11.1 RC 1 can be found at http://software.opensuse.org/developer. See http://en.opensuse.org/Mirror_Selection for a full list of mirrors. Note that you don’t need to choose a mirror yourself, but you can use the mirror list if you want or need to select a mirror manually.

Most Annoying Bugs

While many bugs have been eliminated since the last beta, we still have a few remaining (and new) bugs that testers should be aware of:

Bug 448270: the license has no translations yet
Bug 449711: no OpenOffice for ppc
Bug 449422: Amarok2 on KDE4 does not stop
Bug 449513: Novell vpn doesn’t work at novell-ipsec-tools 0.7.1.

Future Release Announcements

Note to openSUSE contributors: If you have any changes or features to call out for future release announcements, please send an email to Zonker with any information that should be in that announcement. (Preferably at least two days before the scheduled release.

    Issue #47 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!
In this week’s issue:

• openSUSE 11.1 Beta 5.1 for PowerPC Released
• Fresh Factory Live-CDs
• People of openSUSE: Vincent Untz
• ARM Support for openSUSE Buildservice and openSUSE
• First SUSE Studio Production

The openSUSE Weekly News is translated to:
German,
Russian,
Japanese,
Spanish,
Portuguese and
Indonesian.

Meeting page

The openSUSE Project and YaST team are happy to announce the winner of the YaST Mascot Contest. After extensive deliberation, the judges have chosen the Aardvark concept, submitted by Klára Cihlářová.

The judges have also settled on a name for the mascot, which will be called Yastie.

We had a lot of great submissions, and it wasn’t easy picking the best idea out of the bunch. We received a number of high-quality submissions, and it’s clear that a lot of thought and hard work went into each submission. Thanks to everyone who participated, it shows just how important YaST is to the community.

As we mentioned in the contest guidelines, we were looking for an idea for the mascot, and not necessarily the final artwork. We want to make sure that the YaST Mascot fits with other openSUSE artwork and branding. Our own Jakub Steiner (jimmac) is going to work on the final artwork, and we’ll be showing that very soon.

Thanks again to everyone who participated!

Continuing the last ‘People of openSUSE” interviews with people involved in the openSUSE Board Elections Committee, today we introduce you another member – Vincent Untz. Vincent is a Novell employee working 101% of his time for the openSUSE and GNOME projects, non-stop!

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    Issue #46 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!
In this week’s issue:

• openSUSE 11.1 Beta 5 Released
• Updated Build Service Roadmap
• KDE’s Compositing in openSUSE 11.1
• SLES Now Easy for Users of RHEL and CentOS
• YaST Preview

The openSUSE Weekly News is translated to:
German (delayed),
Russian,
Japanese,
Spanish,
Portuguese (delayed) and
Indonesian (delayed).

The Beta5 DVD and NET ISO images for PowerPC have just been replaced by Beta5.1 ISO images.  The only change is the way the ISOs are created – now they are bootable media.

There is a Delta-ISO from Beta5 DVD to Beta5.1 available in case you have Beta5 downloaded.

The media are available at the same place Beta5 is available: http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.1-Beta5

Additionally new initrd and linuxrc for PowerPC have been uploaded in the PPC-HotFix directory.

These files are for Pegasos and Efika PowerPC systems if you want to do a network installation.  Use these files and boot with the insecure=1 kernel parameter.

If you have further questions, please ask on the openSUSE PPC mailinglist,

Andreas

Aaron Bockover has announced that the 1.4 release of Banshee is now available. The new release includes support for Android G1, better device support, a new track editor, the ability to rescan libraries for new or deleted tracks — plus 196 bugs fixed since Banshee 1.2.1.

See the Banshee download page for the one-click installer for openSUSE 11.1 and 10.3, as well as packages for other platforms.