In order to optimize the YaST partitioner module for openSUSE users the user experience team decided to conduct a small survey to figure out how you deal with hard disk configuration. The survey contains some basic questions and its results will directly influence the redesign for the partitioner module.

You can access the survey here.

The survey will be online until 28th May 2008 and the results will be published on openSUSE.org as soon as possible.

Answering the questions will take less than five minutes.

Thank you for your participation and have a lot of fun!

The openSUSE team is proud to announce the second Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! New changes include countless bug fixes, as well as the import of the new openSUSE 11.0 artwork for login, splash screens and more. The live installation should work, but there are several known quirks, so be sure to check the most annoying bugs list before proceeding.

See Screenshots/openSUSE_11.0_Beta2 for more screenshots.

Information and Download

Remember that this is a beta. It may not be safe to run for production systems, and should be used by users interested in testing the next release of openSUSE for bugs.

Most Annoying Bugs

Live CD:

• Automatic Configuration after boot into installed system behaves weird (Bug #385563, Bug #385558)
• Installation leaves traces of Live system (Bug #385829)

General:

• GNOME Main Menu is slow to respond (Bug #375701) Workaround: Click on volume control in the panel, Configure local sound server then check “Enable network access to local sound devices”
• GNOME is extremly slow (Bug #383336) (logging in takes >1 minute etc) Workaround: Add your hostname to /etc/hosts (See bug)

See the Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs_11.0_dev page on the wiki for an up-to-date list.

Call for Testing

If you want to help testing our standard test-cases, just take a look at openSUSE.org/Testing, and in particular the Testing:Features_11.0 sub-page which includes a definitive list of the features added into openSUSE 11.0. You can also coordinate with others and subscribe to the opensuse-testing@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list to help with our organized testing.

Media and Download

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2 for i386, x86-64 and PPC comes as different media sets, all of which can be downloaded from http://software.opensuse.org/developer. Deltas from Beta 1 are also provided. Note that you will need the latest deltarpm from Factory, or for openSUSE 10.3 you can use the home:coolo repository to grab it.

Comments, Feedback and Helping

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 2 is a great time to start testing-out openSUSE 11.0 before it is officially released. You can directly help and contribute to the openSUSE distribution by filing bug reports and giving feedback to the developers.

• Reporting bugs: Please report all bugs you find on in our Bugzilla as explained on bugs.openSUSE.org.
• Discussion and feedback is very welcome as well; the most appropriate place is the opensuse-factory@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list. Or in the #opensuse-factory IRC channel.

For other queries and ways to communicate with the openSUSE community take a look at the Communicate wiki page.

The next planned release is openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 on May 13.

Michal Vyskocil has requested a new mailing list around Java topics. You can subscribe to it or browse the newly created archive. This nicely fits our other Java changes, which can be discussed on the mailing list:

• Debian and Ubuntu based Java buildings: It was not possible so far to build Java based packages for Debian or Ubuntu, because Java lives there in non-free or Multiverse repositories. We have imported these as Debian:Etch:NonFree or Ubuntu:*:Multiverse projects to offer java builds in future. We would like to thank Carsten Höger from Open-Xchange for his help and the needed java preinit package. A nice example for using Java on deb based distributions is the server:OX:snapshot project.
• openSUSE:Factory is using open source Java from openJDK6 now. We switched to openJDK6 as default Java to be able to deliver a complete open source Factory distribution including Java. This is currently not a final decision, just a test approach to evaluate the situation. This affects also everybody who builds a Java package for Factory using the generic “BuildRequires: java-devel”, openJDK6 will be used in this case as a Java environment. A drawback is the increased bootstrap time for Java in Factory atm, increasing the time for a complete Factory rebuild to several days. We are working hard to avoid this again in future.

The openSUSE team is proud to announce the first Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! There are many exciting enhancements and features in the new release. Among these is the incredibly fast package management (libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new installer, live CDs and much more.

What’s New

The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes quite a few changes and new features that users will find interesting, including:

KDE 4 and KDE 3.5: The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes KDE 4.0.3, which includes a number of new features, fixes, and optimizations. See the KDE4 page for more info on the KDE4 branch. To help test, see the wiki for info on reporting bugs in KDE. Not quite ready to move to KDE4? No worries, the beta includes an installation option for KDE 3.5 in addition to KDE4.

GNOME 2.22: Beta 1 includes GNOME 2.22.1 with plenty of new features and packages. Interested in helping with testing for GNOME in openSUSE 11.0? See the wiki for all the info you need.

YaST ported to Qt4: openSUSE’s administration and installation tool, YaST, has been ported to Qt4, providing beautiful styling for the installer, and an improved look for areas such as package management.

Screenshots!

Here’s a quick look at openSUSE 11.0 beta 1:

For some more screenshots head over to Screenshots/openSUSE_11.0_Beta1 on the wiki.

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After four regular weeks and one hack week after Alpha 2, we are very happy to announce openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 3.

  

See more screenshots on the Screenshots/openSUSE_11.0_Alpha3 wiki page

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Zonker wrote the following:

I’m happy to announce that the openSUSE Project has been accepted to Google’s Summer of Code 2008! Now the real fun begins!

We’re now in the “interim period” for students to discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations. (That’d be us.) Students will then have from March 24th through March 31st to apply to Google. See our ideas page, and Google’s SoC 2008 FAQ for more info and timeline.

Kudos to Google for acting quickly on this — applications for organizations were due last Wednesday, and I was notified this afternoon that we had been accepted. That’s pretty speedy, given the number of applications I’m sure they had to read through.

Discussion about openSUSE’s participation in Google’s SoC 2008 is most appropriate on the opensuse-project mailing list.

Only three weeks after Alpha1, we’re glad to announce the release of openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2. There are various exciting changes in there that we would like to have feedback on.

  
For more screenshots head over to the Screenshots/openSUSE 11.0 Alpha2 wiki page

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With the new year beginning we kick start major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0 (roadmap). A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing.

More screenshots are available at The Coding Studio

Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory, we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth a try if you have time for testing. Note, however, that it is not suitable for production systems.

Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0

We have seen 1026 package check-ins since Alpha0 and countless bugs fixed. The main changes against Alpha0 are:

• Sat Solver integration
  • Michael Schröder’s “sat solver” library is now the default package solver for libzypp, so make sure you doublecheck the selected packages - there might be suprises ahead. Please note that we need test cases for things that look funny to you (wiki link)
• Heavy changes to the appearance of the Qt installation (ported to qt4)
  • Note that it’s still in draft state and your feedback is welcome
• KDE 4.0.0
• perl 5.10
• glibc 2.7
• NetworkManager 0.7
• CUPS 1.3.5
• Pulseaudio

Most Annoying Bugs

Due to the huge amount of changes, there are also several noticeable bugs:

• The new solver does not yet have a “ignore this requirement” choice, i.e. it’s not possible to create a broken system. We’re still discussing if this is a bug or a feature
• the CDs lack a huge amount of software. Many packages had to be taken out to make way for others. The CDs should still have a a completely working desktop, however.
• the Qt port and its theme are early releases and create noticeably more flickering and drawing glitches, e.g. the progress bar is only visible on some installations
• jpackage packages are broken and one package will complain during installation - just ignore
• the installation crashes at the end when creating the x11 proposal: in this case, your desktop will still have a working X config, it just might not be the perfect one. You may need to call sax2 after it happens
• PPC cannot be installed as the bootloader config can’t be written out. However, you can get a working PPC system when updating from alpha0

Media and Download

Please refer to software.openSUSE.org/developer for direct links to all the available media.

Have a lot of fun!

For the last issue of their openSUSE release series, Novell Open Audio has talked to Marcus Meißner, team lead of the SUSE security team, to learn about the processes triggered by a security incidence, proactive source code audits, teaching developers how to write more secure software and AppArmor.

We’d like to kick start the development of openSUSE 11.0 by releasing the current state of Factory as an Alpha0 release. Since the release of 10.3, we checked in 2187 packages including fundamental package updates such as:

• gcc 4.3.0
• kernel 2.6.24-rc4
• X.org 7.3
• KDE 3.5.8
• KDE 4.0 RC1
• CUPS 1.3.4
• gdb 6.7.1
• Alsa 1.0.15
• Gimp 2.4
• Yast2 2.16

The change between 10.3 and Alpha0 is quite big, but it still works pretty nicely. So please join the openSUSE 11.0 development in downloading, testing and using Alpha0 or daily updated Factory distribution.

The most annoying bugs are as usual listed on Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs_11.0_dev

So far there are some glitches in the installation process, that are mostly harmless. But the new kernel in particular can cause some regressions we would love to hear about through bugzilla, as described on bugs.openSUSE.org.

You can get it from http://en.opensuse.org/Development_Version#Downloads

Greetings, Stephan