openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1 Available for Testing
by Kristin Shoemaker - Sep. 21, 2008Comments (1)- Related Blog Posts
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The openSUSE Project recently announced the availability of openSUSE 11.1 Beta 1 for wide scale testing and bug squashing. This development release is available in x86, x86-64 and PPC architectures as a DVD disk image (liveCDs are not available for the current beta).
The 11.1 beta provides a decently solid look at where the final release is heading. As with any development release, there are known bugs that vary in severity and new or updated features that the development team is encouraging users try out, in order to find and resolve any bugs and suggest changes and improvements.
It is hard (and perhaps impossible) to discuss openSUSE without acknowledging it is a distribution that evokes an amazing array of strong feelings in the community. Even Linux users on the same end of the spectrum have radically different reasons for similar conclusions. And it did seem at the start that Novell and the openSUSE Project had a real identity problem -- not only in how others perceived the project, but how the community saw itself. In some ways, the 10.x releases reflected this. They were stable, decent, respectable releases. They also were lacking something -- there were upgraded applications, yet nothing felt particularly new, or cohesive. It was hard to tell whether it was a loss of direction, or confidence. It all worked, but felt as if the distribution was playing it too safe.
openSUSE 11.0 has turned heads since its release earlier this summer. Package management with YaST became a much cleaner, faster affair. Package management with Zypper, a command line alternative to YaST, rivals (and some say surpasses) other command line package management tools. Were there other areas needing attention? There always are. But the 11.0 release, with faster package management, and a liveCD installer, felt like the openSUSE Project had found its sense of self again.
This inspires a lot of confidence in the openSUSE 11.1 improvements, even with its beta status. There are some changes to YaST, including a re-written printer module, a new disk partitioner module (the developers have indicated testing in this area would be most appreciated), and a re-written security module that checks the system as configured. openSUSE 11.1 can run in an IPv6 environment and is capable of running an IPv6 web server. New bluetooth tools and support have been introduced, and both the KDE (3.5.10 and 4.1.x) and GNOME (2.24) desktops have updates and enhanced features.
This release is still a beta (and an early one at that) and the openSUSE Project recommends that it not be used on production machines for this reason. They do welcome anyone interested in testing and bug hunting to get involved. openSUSE 11.1 is slated for public release on December 18th, 2008.
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