The fourth of seven scheduled milestone releases for 11.3 was completed and released on schedule. Milestone 4 focuses on switching to upstart as init daemon.

Here’s what you may find interesting in the new release:

• OpenOffice.Org has been updated to 3.2.1 Beta1 with new features

• NetworkManager has been updated to version 0.8 with fixes to better support bluetooth and GSM.

• cups has been updated to version 1.4.2, it “adds over 67 changes and new features to CUPS 1.3.11, including improved Bonjour/DNS-SD support, supply level and status reporting for network printers via SNMP, an improved web interface, and the CUPS DDK tools.”

• The conntrack  - network filtering system has been added. These are userspace tools that allow system administrators interact with the Connection Tracking System, which is the module that provides stateful packet inspection for iptables.

• The Mono stack has been updated to the bug fix release 2.6.3 together with MonoDevelop 2.2.2.

• Python was updated to the bug fix release 2.6.5 RC 2

• samba has been updated to version 3.5.1

• The Moblin team has started with the integration of the Moblin UI into the distribution and plan to have everything ready for the next milestone.

• The LiveCDs  have virtualbox guest tools.  Now features like  screen resizing, seamless mode, and shared clipboards work fine and automatically after boot-up! Check this (~8,5MB) ogv video to see the guest addition features in action.

Gnome/GTK desktop users:

• GNOME has been updated to the GNOME 2.30 release candidate (2.29.92)

  • With the next milestone, empathy will be the default IM client for GNOME. Empathy supports now sending files via drag & drop and the IRC module now includes support for common IRC commands such as /join.

  • Tomboy’s startup time has been drastically improved. Syncing is now done automatically.

  • Natilus’ user interface now includes a new split view mode and the default is set to browser mode.

KDE desktop users:

• KDE has been updated to version 4.4.1 the most important changes:

  • A performance problem in KMail when sending emails has been fixed

  • Various fixes in Plasma widgets and other addons, such as the analog clock and the picture frame

  • A number of fixes in Konsole, KDE’s powerful terminal application

• Amarok is now at version 2.3, “Areas such as podcast support and saved playlists have seen huge improvements, as has the support for USB mass storage devices (including generic MP3 players)”.

• k3b is updated to 2.0 RC2

LXDE desktop users:

• Switch to pcmanfm 0.9.3 and libfm 0.1.9. Now lxde fully supports trash, automount, gvfs, “menu-browsing” and much more.

• lxsession: upgrade to 0.4.3 with d-bus support

As this is a milestone release, 11.3 milestone 4 does contain bugs that we know about, but should not stand between courageous contributors and release testing.

The known bugs include:

• gwibber has been updated but depends on desktopcouch and that stack is not yet integrated into openSUSE.

You can track the most annoying bugs on the wiki along with 11.3 development. If you want to make sure 11.3 final is free of annoying bugs, we’ll need your help finding, reporting, and fixing those hidden bugs.

To learn more about testing openSUSE, visit the Testing pages on the openSUSE wiki. To follow the testing and development process, we suggest that you subscribe to the openSUSE-Factory mailing list (Subscribe

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The next openSUSE Milestone is scheduled to be released on Friday, April  the 9th, with additional new features and bug fixes.

Get Milestone 4 Today!

What are you waiting for? Grab the milestone release from software.opensuse.org/developer today!