openSUSE 11.3 - Progress in Motion: The openSUSE Ecosystem, Part 7

On Thursday, February 4th I gave a talk for the Bellingham Linux Users Group (BLUG), 'touring' openSUSE 11.2 as a desktop OS, and giving a broad overview of the projects and community that culminates in the openSUSE Linux distribution. For those who missed it, here's part seven of the written interpretation of my discussion.

openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 2 (Number Two Always Tries Harder)

11.3M2 released on February 17th, right on schedule. M2 includes final releases of many major projects that were in prerelease for M1: KDE 4.4, OpenOffice.org 3.2, and VirtualBox 3.1.4.

11.3 is shaping up to be an unusually large update on the desktop, with major updates to KDE and Gnome, as well as the addition of LXDE as a lightweight desktop. Empathy may finally supplant Pidgin as the default Gnome IM client, and Digikam and Evolution both have substantially improved new releases.

Under the hood, kernel 2.26.33 (which is now in RC8) is the working kernel, and hwinfo 16.12 adds new cpu feature detection.

Development tools are also getting a shakeup, with Monodevelop 2.2 (on Mono 2.6), Bootchart 2.0, and a host of updates to the Kiwi imaging system (which powers OBS, SUSE Studio, and openSUSE's LTSP implementation).

Current work is now focused on moving over to GCC 4.5 for the M3 release, scheduled for March 4.

You can always download the current development release at http://software.opensuse.org/developer