The openSUSE Project Ships 10.2 Release

Published: December 12, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The openSUSE Linux operating system development project sponsored by Novell to fuel the creation of its SUSE Linux implementations for desktops and servers knows just what you should do for the holiday season: give the new openSUSE 10.2 production release a spin.

While openSUSE 10.2 is not an earth-shattering release by any measurements, Michael Loffler, product manager for Novell's SUSE Linux Products unit, which participates in the openSUSE project alongside developers from outside Novell's walls, says that there are a number of enhancements that make the new release worth a try. The software comes in a five CD set, with an add-on CD for proprietary software such as Acrobat, RealPlayer, and a Java runtime environment.

openSUSE 10.2 has a standard Linux kernel for both single-processor and multiprocessor machines; you do not have to use the kernel-smp package any more to run on SMP systems, but there is a tiny bit of overhead that non-SMP systems pay to have a unified kernel. Also, the ext3 file system is now the default on installation by Novell's Yast tool--and not just because the creator of the ReiserFS file system is in jail on murder charges. The ext3 file system is backwards compatible with ext2, but the future ReiserFS 4 file system will not be backwards compatible with ReiserFS 3, and it also has trouble scaling on large file systems. Yast also walks end users through setting up the Logical Volume Manager and the Enterprise Volume Management features, which are not really useful for desktops, but the desktop user is the guinea pig for the future SLES 10 SP1 or SLES 11 customer. BIOS RAID disk mirroring and parity protection are now supported with openSUSE 10.2; earlier Linux 2.4 kernels could handle this, but with the move to openSUSE 10.X and SLES 10, this support was not in the Linux 2.6 kernel. This was not progress, but the openSUSE team is fixing it.

The openSUSE 10.2 release includes a snapshot of all the latest open source packages, including redesigned Gnome and KDE desktops with Beagle search engines built in, plus Firefox 2.0, which is a major update from the Firefox 1.5 that was used in the prior openSUSE release, known as SUSE Linux 10.1. The cdrecord package has been replaced with the wodim package, which can write to CDs or DVDs. Synchronization with mobile devices is now done through the OpenSync package, not multisync. The project has also moved from Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) 1.1 to 1.2 release, and the changes are incompatible; that means you have to reconfigure your printers.

The openSUSE 10.2 release also supports internal SD card readers and has new features for managing software packages better and for making use of the power-saving features in modern computers. The Zypper command line program updater as well as the graphical Opensuseupdater have been added to automate updates to packages in the distro or openSUSE itself.

openSUSE 10.2 is available on 32-bit X86, 64-bit X64, and 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC platforms. The software is available for free to download at the openSUSE project site. Novell is also distributing a boxed set of the code, just like it used to do for the former SUSE Linux Professional, which was the cutting-edge, development desktop release that was eventually spun into server and commercial desktop releases. The boxed set is not available online yet, but if history is any guide, Novell will charge $59.95 for this, as it did for SUSE Linux Professional 10.0 and 10.1.