Another week went by and the OpenSUSE project has made further progress towards 11.0. Here are some highlights.

Development

Development news, as always, you can find in the OpenSUSE Web site, but our accumulation is totally separate and independent from it. Every Saturday we try to be gentler because of the nature of OpenSUSE.

In this week:

* Announcing openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 * People of openSUSE: Wolfgang Koller * Status Updates * Duncan Mac-Vicar P.: The greatest unknown openSUSE 11.0 package management feature * Lukáš Ocilka: Function Keys in YaST ncurses Frontend * andi.opensuse-id.org: KDE 4.0.4 on openSUSE 10.3

The image on the left is GPL-licensed and it's from YaST, which is still being worked on heavily. Here is a small progress report -- with visuals -- of the redesigned YaST expert partitioner.

An item that was also picked by OpenSUSE Weekly News is this one from Duncan, which speaks of an "unknown openSUSE 11.0 package management feature," to use his own words.

During the development of openSUSE 11.0, we have been reporting in real time cool improvements like the fast installation, how YaST became sexy, how YaST/ZYpp/zypper became fast, how YaST/ZYpp/zypper performs better than others and even that our solver is also really smart.

Bugs

Zonker called for help with bug management.

Attention openSUSE users and contributors! It’s time to exercise your vote and help the openSUSE team identify the bugs that need to be squashed prior to the openSUSE 11.0 release. On May 22nd, we’re having a bug voting day to help ensure we identify the most troublesome issues in Bugzilla under openSUSE 11.0.

The resolvability of bugs was covered in Softpedia also, but not in the very same context.

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 Resolves Over 700 Bugs

The third and last beta version of openSUSE 11.0 was announced last night. Beta 3 fixes over 700 bugs, adds some new artwork and a few updated packages.

People

Last week's person of openSUSE was Wolfgang Koller, whom you can learn a little more about.

While some are preparing their fly to Austria to attend EURO 2008, ‘People of openSUSE’ already flew but rather to meet Wolfgang Koller - founder of SuSELinuxSupport community and author of some nice KDE applications such as KTrafficAnalyzer.

Funding

The press release about Google's Summer of Code was mentioned last week, but here are a couple of articles that covered it a little later. The first one shows that some of the output will be of general use to more GNU/Linux distributions (not just SUSE).

The projects funded by Google are as follows:

* LTSP GUI Management for openSuse by Jan Weber (mentored by Jigish Gohil) * Interactive Crash Analysis by Nikolay Derkach (mentored by Jan Blunck) * Face-Based Authentication by Rohan Anil (mentored by Alex Lau Chun Yin) * Grub4ext4: Enable ext4 File System as Boot Partition by PengTao (mentored by Coly Li)

[...]

Timothy Prickett Morgan has a summary of recent developments, including the above.

Novell Buys $100 Million in Shares, Joins Google Summer of Code

Commercial Linux distributor Novell said last week that its board of directors has authorized the company to head on down to Wall Street with a couple of bales of cash to buy up shares of the company's stock in a effort to bolster the shares and boost per share earnings growth calculations in the coming quarters. Novell also announced that search engine giant Google is funding some openSUSE projects as part of its Summer of Code donations back to the open source community.

We wrote about the buybacks in [1, 2].

Reviews

Every week there are a few people who write about their experiences with stable versions or development versions of OpenSUSE. Here is one such experience, which is largely positive

OpenSUSE is another awsome linux, other than the few i blogged about earlier ( Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, .. ).

The best part of OpenSUSE is its installation procedure. It really rocks.

Here is a more negative one.

I downloaded the Ubuntu CD image, burned it to a disk, swapped the hard drives and booted the CD. Less than an hour later the installation was finished, and it was up and running. I have tried this several times before, most recently with SuSE Linux, and this one the first time that it seemed to have gotten all of the major laptop devices and configurations figured out properly. I'm impressed.

Here is a comparison.

Arch has taught me so much and I will go back to it one day. For now, I plan to decide between three popular KDE distros - openSUSE, Kubuntu and Fedora. The desktop environment of choice? KDE 4.0.

[...]

openSUSE 10.3 :

* Use of the Aya plasma theme with new artwork rocks. * YaST uses an Oxygen icon theme which suits it. * Firefox doesn’t look that ugly even without the gtk-qt-engine for some reason. * Only KDE 4 applications present. * YaST installer messed up my GRUB for some reason; took a while to fix. * Printer setup was fine. * Slow YaST (since this is 10.3) makes me wait eagerly for 11.0.

Lastly, here is a test drive of the development build.

In Satuday evening I tried KDE Live on VMWare environment before playing with the DVD iso. Surprised, it was worked flawlessly, running well without problem including Live installation. I don’t know why the LiveCD worked without problem on VMWare workstation but having problem on physical machine. I assumes that it would like the problem with the iso burned on CD, not with iso itself, so I take another blank disc and burned the kde live iso once again.

OpenSUSE's KDE side in 11.0 will be an interesting one to watch. A lot of the latest Qt is incorporated and last week's news from Nokia (about mobile Linux) elevates hopes that the company will take Maemo further, maybe at the expense of Symbian. Might Nokia change its mind and let Qt maintain more focus on the desktop? It seems safe to at least remain hopeful.

KDE is moving fast! ⬆