Scott Morris of SUSE rants/blog wrote about reasons to choose GNU/Linux whilst corruption takes the economy down. But anyway, on to some happier news.

OpenSUSE 11.1

Some applications or features are already being tested under near-final OpenSUSE 11.1 builds, which shall be finalised almost on the very same day as my birthday. Here is a review of Opera 10.0 (alpha) under OpenSUSE 11.1 and one about SELinux.

Here is a fuller review of the almost-current build of OpenSUSE 11.1.

I’ve been a long time SuSE user, I enjoyed the old boxed sets with the big manuals and CD books full of software. With that view I have always looked forward to every release of the distribution.

There's also the following video review below. It's very new.

Direct link

Bill Beebe has tried the release candidate and compared it to Fedora, the OpenSUSE equivalent at Red Hat.

* Fedora 10 is better than Fedora 9, at least on the Dell notebook. * KDE 4.1 and Nvidia drivers really don't like one another under Fedora 10 on the Dell. * OpenSUSE 11.1 is much nicer, especially when compared with OpenSUSE 10.3, but as good as it is I still miss Mandriva 2008 quite a bit (and possibly 2009).

Preparations for a release party have begun and users are reminded to install Fedora's Smolt in order to track OpenSUSE users and their hardware (an opt-in thing that's mostly beneficial).

One quick reminder for folks installing/upgrading openSUSE 11.1 in the days to come — we’d like as many users as possible to participate in using Smolt.

Packaging

One of the Lizards has worked on bringing Scratch to OpenSUSE. For those who are new to it:

Some german teacher point me to “Scratch” a few weeks ago. This week, I tried to create a package for openSUSE.

A Build Service update is announced for KDE4 as well... and for KDE lovers, added below is a bit of KDE 4.2 (beta) under OpenSUSE.

Direct link

Here is some OpenSUSE fun with Compiz-Fusion and AWN.

DaniWeb has this short article which talks about SUSE Studio.

If you've always wanted to create your own Linux distribution (distro), like I have, now you can by using a tool that was originally developed to create Virtual Appliances. SUSE Studio (still currently in alpha) is a web-based tool that helps you create Linux Virtual Appliances and complete bootable distros on CD/DVDs or USB drives.

Starting in early 2009, you can sign up for the beta version but to see the power of this tool now, you can pick up the January 2009 copy of Linux Pro Magazine complete with screenshots and a full description of its features.

Other Stuff

OpenSUSE is being labeled "Linux for the Lazy" (in a good way).

Finally, I went back to openSUSE 11.0. I did a network install. I still have one minor glitch: the GRUB installer did not remove the FreeBSD Boot Manager, and I can’t get the system past that. I have to boot from CD, then use the “Boot from Hard Drive” option. It’s okay for now, but I need to find out how to clean that up. Since rebooting Linux is pretty rare, it’s not a major problem right now.

Here is a ranking of distributions which was done by an OpenSUSE user. He's not terribly fond of OpenSUSE though, ranking it just 4^th (among 5).

I’m an openSUSE user and have been impressed with it for a while, but was openSUSE my number one recommended choice? No…

Well, here are my results.

1. Ubuntu Linux 2. Fedora 3. Debian GNU/Linux 4. openSUSE 5. Mandriva Linux

I got the same results and the same order form both of the choosers. But zegenie just didn’t put Debian on the list.

The main news this week is about SLED 10 and H-P. It's the main news to allude to. For more stuff about OpenSUSE, see Weekly News.

Welcome to issue # 49 of openSUSE Weekly News!

In this week:

* Andreas Jaeger: openSUSE 11.1 Goes RC2 * Joe Brockmeier: Mounting remote directories using FUSE and sshfs on openSUSE * Henne Vogelsang: What’s Working Well and What To Do With It * RedDwarf: Check your multimedia problem in ten steps * arstechnica.com: Distro(s) of the Year: OpenSUSE and Foresight

Next week will be a busy one for OpenSUSE coverage. ⬆