Announcing openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1

The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes quite a few changes and new features that users will find interesting, including:

KDE 4 and KDE 3.5: The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes KDE 4.0.3, which includes a number of new features, fixes, and optimizations. See the KDE4 page for more info on the KDE4 branch. To help test, see the wiki for info on reporting bugs in KDE. Not quite ready to move to KDE4? No worries, the beta includes an installation option for KDE 3.5 in addition to KDE4.

GNOME 2.22: Beta 1 includes GNOME 2.22.1 with plenty of new features and packages. Interested in helping with testing for GNOME in openSUSE 11.0? See the wiki for all the info you need.

YaST ported to Qt4: openSUSE’s administration and installation tool, YaST, has been ported to Qt4, providing beautiful styling for the installer, and an improved look for areas such as package management.

Here’s a quick look at openSUSE 11.0 beta 1:

For some more screenshots head over to Screenshots/openSUSE_11.0_Beta1 on the wiki.

New Package Management Solver and Meta-data: the package management stack of openSUSE, libzypp, has seen constant improvements since the last release. We introduced a new SAT solver (slides, video) and repository metadata that means that openSUSE’s package management works at a lightning-fast speed.

Installation in 24 minutes: Due to changes within the installation media itself and the advances in openSUSE’s package management, an openSUSE installation is now well over 60% faster, completing in roughly just 24 minutes! (Your mileage may vary, offer not valid for 486s…)

Other:

Linux kernel 2.6.25-rc9
updated gcc 4.3 branch
libzypp 3.12.1
PackageKit 0.2.0
AppArmor 2.3
Xen 3.2.1 RC1
glibc 2.8 CVS
PulseAudio 0.9.10

Obsessive package watchers can find a list of packages in Factory that’s updated daily. (Just see the column labeled “Factory.”)

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 for i386, x86-64 and PPC comes as different media sets, all of which can be downloaded from http://software.opensuse.org/developer.

-openSUSE news