SUSE 10.1 Beta 4 Looking for a Few Good Servers

Published: February 21, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you are feeling adventurous, the openSUSE project, which is creating the next generation of Novell's SUSE desktop Linux and its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server variant, would love to get a little help from you testing out the new SUSE 10.1 Beta 4 release of the development version of the operating system.

The openSUSE project warns that the beta release has "some rough edges," such as the partitioner not working right (it sometimes mixes up existing partitions and cannot make new ones), but if you are starting with a fresh install and a single partition, it apparently works alright. Incidentally, the project warned that this beta is, for other reasons, intended as a fresh install only, not as an upgrade of an existing Linux machine. (There is some suggestion that if you manually partition a disk using fdisk and then do an install, it works fine, but openSUSE is still testing this hypothesis.) Also, Novell's Yast system management tool and VMware virtual machine logical partitions (as distinct from the disk partitions discussed above) are not working perfectly together yet. The VMware partitions will work on SUSE Linux 10.1 Beta 4, but Yast can't see all of the partition's properties. Network installation over Samba doesn't work, but using HTTP, NFS, or FTP does work. There are also issues with the new package manager, which is a hybrid of Novell's yast2 and Ximian's libredcarpet packagers, now called libzypp. You should read the release notes before diving in. I am curious about all this, so I plan to take a stab at installing it on a new baby server I am building.

SUSE Linux 10.1 will have a fifth beta come out on February 23 and a sixth on March 2. While it is never easy to schedule operating system releases, the openSUSE project was expecting to have SUSE 10.1 Release Candidate 1 out the door last week. It is reasonable to assume that Novell wants to get the official SUSE Linux 10.1 out the door by its Brainshare user group meeting in Salt Lake City, which runs from March 19 through 24.