openSUSE Leap 42.1 Milestone 1 Available

Douglas DeMaio today announced the release of openSUSE Leap 42.1 Milestone 1, the first public test of upcoming Leap 42.1 based on SUSE Linux Enterprise. openSUSE Leap is so named to reflect how the distribution moves forward and the team is "taking a leap" to make it happen. "This is where the excitement for Leap begins."

DeMaio quoted Richard Brown, chairman of the openSUSE board, saying, "The opportunity for topping this SLE core with the things you want in a long-term release really makes this attractive and I see people wanting to get involved with this next chapter of openSUSE. Leap will fill the gap between the longevity of a SLE core and the innovation related to Tumbleweed."

Leap 42.1 M1 shipped with Linux 4.1.2, Xorg X Server 1.17.2, GCC 5.1, GNOME 3.16.3, Plasma 5.3.2, LibreOffice 4.4.3.2, and Firefox 38.0.6. Xfce 4.12.1 is in the repository. Stephan Kulow reported that the sources for Leap number nearly 5,500 with over 56,500 binaries. 1,150 came from SLE 12.

The versioning of Leap will coincide with that of SLE. The first release is dubbed 42.1 because it will align with SLE 12 SP1. So, a release based on SLE 13 SP2 will be called openSUSE Leap 43.2. 42.1 is expected for released during SUSECon November 2 through November 6.

Download your copy at opensuse.org. However, crash test driver and contributor, Neil Rickert said he had problems at boot reading encrypted partitions and logging into GNOME.