openSUSE 12.3 Reaches Another Milestone

The openSUSE team have released Milestone 1 of the upcoming openSUSE 12.3. 12.3 is planned for release in March 2013 and the first milestone was released a month ago. The newest milestone has lot of structural improvements as well as the usual application updates.

In a post on opensuse.org Will Stephenson outlined many of the updates. He said,

the init system continues to evolve rapidly. Sysvinit has now been removed, following some discussion. Given complete dominion over the boot procedure and device management, systemd has swallowed udev and udisks whole, and the result is systemd v195, up from v44!.

This offers the following features:

* Completely migrated to /usr
* Improved journal data and queries
* Additional conditions for unit files (the systemd equivalent of /etc/init.d/ scripts under sysvinit)
* /media temporary mount points are now under /run/user/
* Suspend, hibernate and the laptop lid switch are now handled by systemd

Stephenson also states that the plug has been pulled on SuSEconfig. SuSEconfig has been the topic of many lively discussions over the years and wasn't really popular. "SuSEconfig was created to replace /etc/rc.config and the often-criticized direct modification of config files by YaST, as a modular host for configuration scripts to apply system-wide changes after installing or removing groups of packages. With the move to dynamic self-configuration by Xorg and NetworkManager, and the removal of slow operations at install time, SuSEconfig is without a role for the first time in more than 12 years."

This release offers KDE 4.9.2, GNOME 3.6, Linux 3.6.3, Firefox and Thunderbird 16.0.2, and GCC 4.7.2. "Removals include the Evolution GroupWise connector, removed due to lack of maintenance. F-Spot likewise falls by the wayside, as does the Sabayon configuration management tool. The Smolt hardware tool was dropped as it was deemed to have served its purpose."

There were performance and operational issues with the live KDE image, but it was an improvement over Milestone 0 (which wouldn't boot at all for me). Download your test copy at opensuse.org.