With red carpets rolling out in Hollywood, you’d expect some applause for the openSUSE 11.4 RC2 release, which has now gone live ahead of 11.4 proper. But with much of the hard work going in behind the scenes, this superb release candidate isn’t getting the fanfare it deserves. The recent Bug Squashing day saw 132 bugs updated so few serious issues remain. Improvements in the ‘backend’ work includes some tweaks to Wifi supplicant and drivers, and a host of small fixes across the distribution which enhance stability and performance. The addition of MediaCurl backend with zsync support to libzypp iut is already being noticed. openSUSE user and forum member Pier Andreit comments that “YaST install/remove software is a thunderbolt!”

The transition from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice still has a few minor documentation blips but more importantly, users should be cautious. (Update 2011-03-01 due to bug 664816 marked as fixed:) The raft of new functionality has created a few specific issues, such as loss of data in tables under certain situations (see bug 664816 – which is fixed for RC2 but only noticed later). Though not quite ready for the production environment, user feedback is critical for smoothing performance and reliability.

KDE SC 4.6 is also running beautifully though 32 BIT nVidia users may have a bug.

If you’d like to help add the final touches of celebrity glam prior to the ‘big event’ of 11.4 release, download it here and check out the most annoying bugs.

openSUSE project manager Stephan Kulow has announced that openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6 (M6) is ready for testing.  With M6, the pace of development is starting to slow down as the focus switches towards QA and bug fixing.

The project has been evaluating systemd vs SysV init to manage system and service startup, and has decided to stay with SysV init for 11.4 due to issues in getting the last 10% of the integration perfect.

M6 sees the completed removal of the HAL hardware abstraction layer, to be replaced with the more up-to-date and actively maintained udev, udisks and upower suite.  HAL was already scheduled for removal in 11.3, but it was retained while the last few software packages which depend on it were ported to udev and company.

Branding and artwork has had a lot of attention, with the addition of the final wallpapers, splash screens and branding for 11.4.  The default wallpaper is called Celadon Stripes, taking its inspiration from the color codename for this release.

New software added in Milestone 6 includes the WebYaST stack.  WebYaST is the web-based admin tool developed for SLES, now available for openSUSE. Professional sysadmins and those who just like to comfortably administer their openSUSE servers will appreciate WebYaST.  Also on the server side, the latest versions of the Horde groupware suite are now in openSUSE.

Software updates this milestone include the update of XOrg to 7.6, VirtualBox 4.0.2, GnuCash 2.4, and Scribus 1.3.9.  A lively discussion on the opensuse-factory list about whether to include the stable Firefox 3.6.13 or a Firefox 4 beta centered around the limited availability of popular extensions for version 4 versus the short upstream maintenance period of Firefox 3 releases.  As this article was published, the discussion was leaning towards taking a Firefox 4 beta and online-updating it to the final release when it becomes available.

Updates are flowing thick and fast to the KDE workspace and applications.   KDE 4.6RC2 is on M6, and will be updated to 4.6.0 final for the first Release Candidate.  The accompanying flurry of application releases include Amarok 2.4.0, Digikam 1.8.0, KOffice 2.3.1, k3b 2.0.2, KDevelop 4.2, KMyMoney 4.5, Rekonq 0.6 and BlueDevil 1.0.1.  Fans of the Oxygen style will also see it in GTK applications, thanks to the native port of Oxygen to a GTK style in the form of the oxygen-gtk package .

As the GNOME project prepares for GNOME 3, the focus at openSUSE is on stabilisation and polish to GNOME 2.32.  Bugfixes to PulseAudio, GDM and gnome-main-menu will ensure that 11.4 brings incremental refinement to GNOME users. Clutter 1.5 is included to support the latest available preview of gnome-shell, and the gramps genealogy tool is added in version 3.2.5.  The GNOME team is preparing an 11.4-based Live CD that will include GNOME 3 when it is released in March.

The XFCE desktop is updated thanks to the hard work of the community to version 4.8, bringing with it network transparent file management, a rewritten panel,  menus editable with Alacarte, and improved packaging and installation selections for openSUSE.

A list of most annoying bugs is being compiled; please check it before installing. We look forward to your bug reports and test experiences too. Automated testing and the openSUSE Factory team have been active to ensure that your download of M6 will be at least minimally functional.

Release Candidate 1 is scheduled for February 10 and brings with it a hard freeze.  openSUSE 11.4 is planned to be released in March 2011.

The openSUSE project released the fifth of six milestones in the development of openSUSE 11.4 some days ago. Milestone 5 (M5) brings a wide range of updates, both major and minor. As usual, you can get it here.

Major Features:

• Kernel 2.6.37rc5-12 is the basis of M5, including the famous “200 line” per tty task groups patch to improve desktop interactivity, and featuring the almost-complete removal of the so-called ‘Big Kernel Lock’, which should improve scalability. This kernel supports new drivers, including Broadcom wireless and updated open-source graphics drivers, and a host of the usual other improvements.
• Libzypp 8.10.2 adds improved support and fixes for metalinks, the multiple download URL specification.
• On the desktop, the KDE Platform makes the leap to version 4.6 beta with many improvements in the UI and underlying infrastructure. This includes a complete rewrite of Kontact and is undergoing heavy testing. There is a serious chance KDE PIM 4.6 will not make it into the final openSUSE 11.4 release, testing and development is needed!
• KOffice is updated to 2.3 RC superseding beta1, including the exciting Krita natural media painting app. Meanwhile OpenOffice.org is removed, having been succeeded by LibreOffice which is updated to 3.3.0.1.
• GNOME 2.32.1 is now available as the 2.32.2 is the final version planned for openSUSE 11.4, which is notable for being the last stable release before GNOME 3 in March.
• GNUCash 2.4 RC comes with a new complete dress-up.
• Pidgin updates fixes several MSN and ICQ issues.
• In the Virtualization area, available now are kernel-xen 2.5.37 features and kernel-ec2 2.6.37 with improvements for cloud sync services and Virtual Box 4 Beta including USB devices support and more than 2GB RAM support on 32 bit guest, Intel HD Audio, asynchronous I/O for iSCSI, VMDK, VHD and Parallels image support.
• systemd 15 provides aggressive parallelization capabilities to start multiple daemons at the same time with dependencies which offers improvements to the boot times on some systems. More testing (and porting of init scripts) is still needed for systemd, which will most likely make it into 11.4 as experimental and optional feature.

Get it!

A list of most annoying bugs is being compiled; please check it before installing. We look forward to your bug reports and test experiences! Automated testing and the openSUSE Factory team have been very active to ensure that your download of  M5 will be at least minimally functional, thanks for that! now go and download it!

The next milestone is scheduled for Thursday, Jan 20 2011, and will be the openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6 release. The final openSUSE 11.4 is planned to be released in March 2011.