openSUSE 11.0 Out the Door and On the Street

Published: June 24, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you want to get a sneak peek at some of the features that will eventually be delivered as part of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 variants for servers and PCs, you can now get it from the openSUSE project, the development effort that creates the code that eventually makes its way into the commercialized SLES and SLED releases. That's because openSUSE 11.0 is now available.

Last week, in an effort to try to steal a little thunder from Red Hat at its customer and partner summit in Boston, the openSUSE project timed the release of openSUSE 11 to coincide with the first day of Red Hat Summit. (Red Hat also makes a habit of making announcements during Novell's BrainShare conference for users and customers. This is ever the way in the IT space.)

The openSUSE project is calling openSUSE 11 a "major update" over previous 10.X releases, and says that there are more than 200 new features and updates to hundreds of applications that are offered as part of the openSUSE stack. It all starts with the Linux kernel, of course, and openSUSE 11.0 is based on the 2.6.25 kernel and is coded with the GCC 4.3 compiler set and the glibc 2.8 libraries. Novell supports SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on 32-bit X86, 64-bit X64, 64-bit Power (IBM System i and System p servers as well as Apple Mac's predating the introduction of X64 chips in the line prior to 2006), 64-bit Itanium, and mainframe processors (which are 31-bit and 64-bit machines, depending on the generation), but openSUSE 11.0 is only available on X86 and X64 processors and System p and Apple PowerPC machines.

The openSUSE 11.0 distro includes the Gnome 2.22 or KDE 4.0 interfaces (and Novell's Gnome project is obviously the default graphical user interface). This is the first openSUSE release that supports the KDE alternative, however, so don't think Novell doesn't appreciate that plenty of users like KDE. (SUSE 8 and earlier releases, which predate Novell's acquisition of SUSE back in November 2003, had equal support for KDE and Gnome.) KDE 3.5 is still available as the option if you don't want to upgrade yet. If you feel like going super-modern, the Compiz Fusion 0.7.4 3D extensions to these interfaces are also available.

The distribution also includes the Firefox 3.0 beta 5, and will be updated with the final 3.0 code once it is available through an online update; the Banshee 1.0 media player is also in the mix, and has been rewritten, according to Novell, to boost its performance and to add video playback. The OpenOffice 2.4 office automation package is in there, too, with Novell's extended Excel and VBA macro support. The project has also redesigned the installer program for openSUSE (and soon, SUSE Linux) to make it easier to install this Linux and manage applications. The YaST tool was, as it turns out, ported to the Qt4 language, which KDE and a number of other programs are coded in, and that means YaST is a lot snazzier. It has also been completely redone under the hood to make it a lot quicker at doing the installation.

Interestingly, openSUSE includes Wine 1.0 Release Candidate 3, the nearly completed first release of the Windows runtime environment that has been in development for--no kidding--15 years. Wine allows programs written for Windows to run on Linux, BSD Unix, and Solaris for X86/X64 operating systems, and currently there are nearly 1,500 Windows applications that can run on the environment. It is not, strictly speaking, an emulator, but a Windows runtime that makes an application think it is running on a Windows machine when it is on a Unix-alike box. This is akin to Sun Microsystems' Project Janus Red Hat containers in Solaris. The software doesn't emulate Linux inside Solaris, but translate APIs and calls on the fly so Linux calls are converted to Solaris calls and hit the right resources. Wine is, in fact, short for Wine Is Not Emulator.

openSUSE 11.0 is available in single DVD images, one for KDE and one for Gnome; LiveCDs are also available. Novell is happy to sell you a boxed set with a manual and 90 days of installation support for $59.95.

The latest openSUSE release is, of course, the code base from which the future SLES 11, SLED 11, and SLERT 11 server, desktop, and real-time server variants of SUSE Linux will be derived. Novell previewed some of the features in SUSE Linux 11 back at the end of March, which I told you all about here. In short, SUSE Linux 11 will have better networking and virtualization support and an appliance variant, too.

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