OpenSUSE Turns Two, Novell Celebrates with 10.3 Beta

Published: August 21, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The open source openSUSE development project behind Novell's commercial SUSE Linux distributions has its second birthday this month, and Novell is celebrating by touting its improved build service for openSUSE and by shipping the first beta of openSUSE 10.3.

The openSUSE 10.3 beta is based on the Linux 2.6.22 kernel, and you can download it here if you want to take it out for a spin. The openSUSE betas are distributed for 32-bit X86, 64-bit X64, and 64-bit PowerPC processors. For desktop distributions, the big changes with Beta 1 of openSUSE 10.3 are that it includes a new feature called 1-Click Install, which as the name suggests, allows open source software packages to be installed on openSUSE with a single click from the openSUSE Build Service. Beta 1 also has preliminary support for the KDE 4 graphical user interface; specifically, some KDE 4 applications and the KDE 4 interface are in the distro as well as the KDE 3.5.7 release, which is the most recent stable variant of that interface. The Gnome 2.19.6 interface is the default on openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1. In addition to support for the Linux 2.6.22.1 kernel, openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 has support for the GNU gcc 4.2.1 compiler set and the libzypp 3.12.1, which is the package dependency resolving engine at the heart of the YaST installation tool and the openSUSE Build Service. DVD and CD applications have been tweaked as well since the Alpha 7 release. OpenSUSE 10.3 Beta 2 is expected to be announced on August 22.

While Novell didn't have much to say about the openSUSE beta, it did talk a bit about how the build service is being built out and used by the community. The build service now has over 700 projects in it and over 20,000 software packages are associated with it. In conjunction with the openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 launch, the openSUSE project also showed off the first version of the build service's new interface, which will allow anyone working from openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, or Mandriva distributions to browse the build service and use it to install Linux applications. Novell also said that in the past four months, over 13 million different software packages have been downloaded from the service.

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