openSUSE News » Announcing openSUSE 11.0 Alpha1

With the new year beginning we kick start major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0 (roadmap). A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing.

openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1 Installer

More screenshots are available at The Coding Studio

Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory, we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth a try if you have time for testing. Note, however, that it is not suitable for production systems.

Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0

We have seen 1026 package check-ins since Alpha0 and countless bugs fixed. The main changes against Alpha0 are:

  • Sat Solver integration
    • Michael Schröder’s “sat solver” library is now the default package solver for libzypp, so make sure you doublecheck the selected packages – there might be suprises ahead. Please note that we need test cases for things that look funny to you (wiki link)

  • Heavy changes to the appearance of the Qt installation (ported to qt4)
    • Note that it’s still in draft state and your feedback is welcome

  • KDE 4.0.0
  • perl 5.10
  • glibc 2.7
  • NetworkManager 0.7
  • CUPS 1.3.5
  • Pulseaudio

Most Annoying Bugs

Due to the huge amount of changes, there are also several noticeable bugs:

  • The new solver does not yet have a “ignore this requirement” choice, i.e. it’s not possible to create a broken system. We’re still discussing if this is a bug or a feature :)
  • the CDs lack a huge amount of software. Many packages had to be taken out to make way for others. The CDs should still have a a completely working desktop, however.
  • the Qt port and its theme are early releases and create noticeably more flickering and drawing glitches, e.g. the progress bar is only visible on some installations
  • jpackage packages are broken and one package will complain during installation – just ignore
  • the installation crashes at the end when creating the x11 proposal: in this case, your desktop will still have a working X config, it just might not be the perfect one. You may need to call sax2 after it happens
  • PPC cannot be installed as the bootloader config can’t be written out. However, you can get a working PPC system when updating from alpha0

Media and Download

Please refer to software.openSUSE.org/developer for direct links to all the available media.

Have a lot of fun!

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