OpenSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 Has Been Released

Francis Giannaros writes "The first beta release for openSUSE 11.0 is now available. Some of the highlights include fast package management, KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1 and an impressive new installer using Qt4 CSS-like stylesheets. Changes behind the scenes include switching to RPM LZMA payload and making RPMs smaller (faster to download), and quicker to decompress (faster installation)."

Dodgy Link

[kernowyon]

Please mod the parent down - this is the dodgy malware linky yet again :(

OpenSUSE is awesome

[Skylinux]

SUSE was my first Linux distribution because I could purchase it at BestBuy.... that was many years ago.
I eventually switched to Slackware to learn Linux but decided to switch back to SUSE a few years ago because I wanted to become productive instead of hunting depended software to satisfy ./configure
Don't get me wrong, there is noting wrong with the "hands on" Linux systems as I recommend Slackware to anybody who wants to know Linux.

One thing that makes me shake my head is the over hyped Ubuntu distribution, bracing for negative mod points now... Seriously though, OpenSUSE makes it so simple to install almost any program, add Pacman's repository, install Mplayer and it all begins to "just work"...

If you have not tried OpenSUSE, give it a try, I doubt you will regret it.

BTW, I am typing this on my Fujitsu laptop connected to a wireless lan which worked "out of the box" ... Windows is a true sandbox OS for me now, useful only for gaming....

Honest and helpful information, I appreciate that

[golodh]

I was struck by the usefulness and honesty of one of the comments on the SuSE 11.0 release site.

This one:

"To make a long story short: KDE 4.0 is not and never was meant to replace 3.5.x for regular users. The main goals were porting to Qt4 and creating the frameworks to create all the things announced for KDE 4. Frameworks are unfortunately hardly visible to the user, so most things that use them, like plasmoids, panel-functionality etc., will only appear after the frameworks are in place, i.e. starting with 4.1." (see http://news.opensuse.org/2008/04/18/announcing-opensuse-110-beta-1/ [opensuse.org])

Now that's a useful comment for an end-user like me. It honestly tells me what's not in the package and what not to expect, and it does so in an up-front manner in three short sentences. As such it's a relief from the way you have to dig for this sort of information on the KDE webpage (see http://www.kde.org/ [kde.org]).

Don't get me wrong, I like the KDE desktop ... but I just don't want to know about (or have to dig through) the details of how the desktop is evolving. Let alone the vagaries of all those applets starting with a K. This announcement is end-user friendly in that it gets to the heart of the matter (i.e. I can try KDE 4 in SuSE 11.0 if I want to beta-test it, but it won't give me anything new) without me having to wade through pages of details ... or worse an install. My compliments.

Re:SuSE does seem the best for packaging mechanics

[IBBoard]

Fedora were planning to include Presto for Yum to allow Fedora 9 to take advantage of 'delta RPMs' that just download the changes. Unfortunately it seems they haven't made it yet. The delta RPMs in SuSe did always seem like a great idea that I thought more distros should take up.

Re:SuSE does seem the best for packaging mechanics

[the eric conspiracy]

delta upgrades is a great feature. However this is about the 4th version of SuSE that promises fast package management. I moved away from SuSE a couple of years ago because of slow package management and package management bugs.

I hope package management is SuSE really is competitive with other distros this time. Otherwise I enjoyed using SuSE.

Re:Honest and helpful information, I appreciate th

[QCompson]

Agreed. If only the KDE was so forthright about the release in January instead of trying to cover for the shortfalls of the final 4.0 release by relying on meaningless marketing drivel. They really should have just named it a "developer release" and avoided all this hoopla.

Re:SuSE does seem the best for packaging mechanics

[Azuma Hazuki]

Uh...no. Foresight Linux (and any distro that uses the Conary package manager) download delta-packages for upgrades. SuSE may be the first one to do it, but it doesn't have a monopoly on the idea.

Warning to KDE users!

[pxc]

If you download the KDE4 LiveCD and want to install it on any system or VM, don't bother! The LiveCD installer is broken. To install the test system, you have to download the DVD.

Somewhere down this page [opensuse.org] it lists it as a "most annoying bug."

Damn right... :-\

Re:SuSE does seem the best for packaging mechanics

[miscz]

It's quite fast since 10.3. I have been waiting for reasonably fast package management in Suse for some time now and most promises were not fulfilled. It seems that Suse developers finally got their act together and 11.0 will bring near apt/dpkg speeds. Actually OpenSUSE 10.3 was the first RPM-based distro that didn't make me want to throw some furniture at my computer. There are still some nasty quirks (like opening dozens of windows that steal focus during installing packages via YaST) but I can stand those.