openSUSE 12.1 Beta Delayed Two Weeks

For those who follow Linux development very closely, openSUSE developers have decided the 12.1 Beta is going to be delayed. During a discussion on the openSUSE development mailing list it became clear that there were still too many showstoppers to roll the release scheduled for today. It's estimated that this could set development back by two weeks.

One of the problems surrounds the switch to Systemd, or in particular its behavior on the live media and with the first boot after installation. The developers schedule is crowded these days putting pressure on the challenging situation. The News Team posted, "And between the timing of last week's openSUSE Conference and next week's planned Hackweek, the Factory team agreed it is better to take the time to ensure a release that meets the level of quality that our openSUSE Distro is known for."

In fact, Systemd is being removed from Tumbleweed as well. Greg K.H. said, "Due to a number of inter dependencies on packages that are not ready for Tumbleweed, and other interactions with the system that are causing problems for some users, I'm going to remove systemd from Tumbleweed today to allow the developers to spend more time on getting it stable for Factory and 12.1 instead of having to chase down problems that are specific to Tumbleweed only."

Other issues are still up in the air as well:

- there are still 22 build failures in openSUSE:Factory:Staging:DtNeeded
- 11.4 artwork needs to go
- several kmps do not build: ndiswrapper, omnibook, vmpware-guest, xen, xtables-addons

Stephan Kulow summed it up by saying, "All in all I see no beta this week and next week SUSE has hackweek blackout ;("  It is believed the delay will not affect the final release date.