openSUSE 12.2 M2, Better Late than Never

Originally scheduled for March 8, openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 2 arrived today for your testing pleasure. Jos Poortvliet outlined several features in the announcement to be included in the final, scheduled for July 11.

Like several other popular distributions, openSUSE 12.2 will support GRUB 2 and Plymouth. Fortunately, users can choose to continue with legacy GRUB if they wish. But this is one of the areas that needs a lot of testing, so users are encouraged to help.

Dominique Leuenberger has accepted the challenge of trying to bring GCC 4.7 to 12.2. It's too early to judge the progress officially, as he's only been working on it for a few days. Despite the red ink all over the Status Monitor, a personal message to the Factory mailing list sounds like he's been on this every minute since accepting.

Some of the other features planned for 12.2 include:

-- Kernel 3.3 or higher
-- Further improvements to systemd
-- Xorg-server 1.12 with multi-touch
-- USRMerge
-- ARM support
-- Appstores
-- Razor-Qt

There were several outreaches in the announcement for testing and reporting bugs. If you'd like to take a test drive, a variety of media formats are available at opensuse.org.

In related news, if you have any artistic talent and would like to create some splashscreens for openSUSE 12.2, a contest has begun. The applications needing new splashes include LibreOffice, Scribus, and Amarok. Check out the guidelines listed at the bottom of that announcement.