Fire up your virtual machines, get your test machines motoring, and start tweaking your fingers.  It’s testing time!

openSUSE 12.1′s next milestone 5 is now ready for download.  Thanks to the men and women of openSUSE Factory who kept their eye on the ball with all the wonderful flurry of activities going on in our Project these days, they never lost sight and we’ll be sure to have an awesome final release in November.

There’s a lot of interesting updates to the 12.1 release and some cool new technologies including GNOME 3 and SystemD.  You’ll definitely want to take this milestone for a spin and see what you can expect in 12.1.  And if you’ve never tested before, its easy if you follow these instructions.  Being a tester is one of the great ways of contributing to the free software movement, and there’s plenty of room for testers in openSUSE Project.

As always with any pre-release, there are some known bugs you should read before starting up your test environment.

Here’s some other interesting things you can expect to see when you try Milestone 5:

• Further changes have been made for systemd to replace the InitV system. The default is still InitV and we encourage testing of systemd so that we can switch the default for the next release.
• We’re focusing on the GPLed OpenJDK version now, this milestone is the last one that comes with the binary Java provided by Oracle.
• GNOME 3.1.5 is another step closer to GNOME 3.2
• glibc has been updated to version 2.14

So, click here as we’d love to hear from you as you begin testing the latest Milestone.  If you already have a previous Milestone installed, simply run “zypper dup” at the command line to update to the latest Milestone.