openSUSE 12.3 Beta 1 Released with Pizza
Today Jos Poortvliet announced the arrival of openSUSE's developmental release, openSUSE 12.3 Beta 1. He expressed the importance of getting this release "a good workout." As an incentive a pizza party is planned, because, after all, hacking is quite difficult on an empty tummy.
openSUSE 12.3 will feature KDE 4.10 and today's beta sports RC2. "KDE has announced a third RC due to some late changes and this version is part of a testing sprint organized by the KDE Quality team. openSUSE KDE packagers have build a special live Image to test this release but we urge you to get the Beta packages from software.opensuse.org as they are of course newer."
The new theme & wallpaper are looking good.
A couple of file managers got some new features and improvements while the whole system received new theme elements. LibreOffice 3.6.3.2.4 (4.0 packages to be made available), Chromium 26.0.1371.0, and Firefox 18 are among the applications. Under the hood we find Linux 3.7.1, Xorg X Server 1.13.1, and GCC 4.7. Be sure to read the announcement for all the great stuff in that kernel. Poortvliet also mentions fixes and improvements to the package manager, but doesn't go into detail.
The openSUSE My Computer seems to have been replaced by KInfocenter.
Pizza Party
I know, I mentioned pizza. It seems openSUSE is throwing a pizza party in Germany to kick-off the openSUSE 12.3 Beta Hackathon. So, yeah, it's for developers and such. But what this means for us ordinary humans is happier openSUSE hackers and a much better openSUSE 12.3. With 240 bugs to squash, we need them well fed. If you're an openSUSE developer and getting this news here, then you better stop by Poortvliet's post for all the relevant links.
Fortunately, you don't really have to be in Nürnberg to help with openSUSE. You can test it and report bugs or organize your own pizza party. Jos has all those links there too. But you have to get a copy of Beta 1 to get started.
Upcoming dates for openSUSE include Artwork freeze on January 24 and the first release candidate on February 7. Two weeks later Release Candidate 2 is scheduled and Gold Master is planned for March 7. Final release is expected March 13.
