IT has been a pleasant time for the project just a couple of weeks ahead of a big release (OpenSUSE 11.1). Cyberorg, mostly an OpenSUSE blogger and contributor, writes about Compiz in this important release, which will be accompanied by a SLE* (version 11). Here is another technical essay about Xen in 11.1 and about remote access (file-wise).

That last item is from Zonker, who also took part in FLOSS Weekly, which is a popular audio-based Web show.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte

Guest: Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier Novell's community manager for OpenSUSE

One of the OpenSUSE Lizards wrote about counting users using Smolt under OpenSUSE.

Smolt is not limited to Fedora and openSUSE btw. Other distros are invited to participate as well. With that I think smolt is a great thing for Linux overall. Hopefully some time in the future it will help us to convince more hardware manufacturers that supporting Linux is important for them.

Smolt is coming from Fedora, which is compared to OpenSUSE in this blog post about flip-flopping between these two strong contenders.

Well, I was all gun ho about trying out Fedora 10. Needless to say, it lasted as long as it took me to burn another OpenSuse dvd, and reboot the machine.

[...]

Now I am back to running OpenSuse 11. I was hoping to hold out until 11.1, but I will upgrade in a short while when it is available.

Another GNU/Linux comparator gets around to trying OpenSUSE and assessing it.

openSUSE isn't quite as easy to use as Ubuntu, so it is probably not for the newest of new users. While it probably isn't for everyone, what makes openSUSE stand out is the unique way in which it handles basic aspects such as navigating to applications. There were a few disappointments, however these mostly appear to be down to me using the release candidate, so I am keen to give openSUSE 11.1 another go when the final version is released later this month.

Over at Ars Technica, whose main GNU/Linux/OSS editor is Ryan Paul, OpenSUSE receives a crown.

Distro(s) of the Year: OpenSUSE and Foresight

The Linux distro landscape is always evolving, and virtually all of the mainstream distros have made significant progress this year. After careful consideration, we decided to give the Ovatio for Distro of the Year to two distributions that we think are particularly deserving. They've both made significant advancements this year and are important parts of the broader Linux ecosystem.

Given Ryan's convictions (he also promotes Mono and Moonlight quite frequently), this is not very surprising. Likewise, OpenSUSE user and journalist David Meyer generated hype around Moonlight along with the rest of them.

Moonlight 1.0 can be used to play Windows Media Video (up to version 9), Windows Media Audio (up to version 10) and MP3. Supported Linux distributions include Suse Linux Exterprise Desktop, OpenSuse 11, Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora Core 9.

The following blog post which is titled "The best Linux distributions of fall 2008" covers OpenSUSE, among other distributions.

It seems that this release cycle is no different from the previous ones - openSUSE v11.1 is simply the best desktop Linux distribution out there. With the failures of the contenders during this fall, the openSUSE wins with a huge margin. The openSUSE 11.1 will be the baseline of the next commercial SLED release, so Novell and SUSE have put of huge amount of effort to this release. Our evaluation is based on the RC1 release candidate.

More news items ought to be available in Weekly News, whose summary follows.

* Development Release: openSUSE 11.1 RC 1 Now Available * Joe Brockmeier: YaST Mascot Winner Chosen! Say Hello to Yastie! * Ben Martin: Debug your shell scripts with bashdb * Lluis Sanchez: MonoDevelop 2.0 alpha 2 is out * Susegeek.com: Linux Kernel Magic SysRq keys in openSUSE for crash recovery

Up next... we shall look at SUSE. ⬆