openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 5: The Community Strikes Back

Milestone 5 (of 7), a snapshot of the Factory “work in progress” build, leading up to openSUSE 11.3 release in July, is now available for download.

M5 was marked by significant contributions from both the openSUSE Community, and the larger Linux community.  We’ve added some interesting new packages, made some updates to core processes, and participated in a coordinated multi-distribution upgrade of a major multimedia component.  Over 50 bugs were fixed and 8 new features were implemented.

Warning: The media cannot be installed on 64-bit x86-64 systems due to  Bug #595545.  Also if you update with zypper dup to current factory, wait until the next rebuild is finished, for details see Bug #595545.

Release News:

• Update to Perl 5.12 (release notes)

• Update to parted 2.2; M5 has a complete toolkit for supporting 4K phyisical sector disks. (openSUSE-factory list)

• KMS integration for Intel and Nvidia (via nouveau driver) graphics, and the ability to disable it. (bugzilla 591400)

• Update to PackageKit 0.6.2, requiring revisions to KPackageKit (openSUSE-factory list)

• Added librcd and librcc, which provide on-the-fly language translation/detection, from the RusXMMS project. (openSUSE-factory list)

• Added xdiskusage, a visual disk-space analyzer. (openSUSE-factory list)

• A bug in OpenOffice.org that caused crashes when copying spreadsheet cells has been resolved. (bugzilla 588957)

• Access to the official SUSE manuals has been improved. (bugzilla 586682)

• Documentation has been corrected for the smbfs to cifs changes. (bugzilla 561993, bugzilla 578621)

• The installation slideshow now talks about version 11.3 instead of 11.2. (bugzilla 588396)

• Lithuanian keyboard layout added. (bugzilla 569554)

• Encrypted swap volumes no longer need to be formatted during install; YaST will prompt for LUKS volume passwords. (bugzilla 581341)

• A locking issue with reiserfs has been resolved and no longer prevents installs. (bugzilla 591807)

• An M4 annoyance with udev init scripts has been fixed. (bugzilla 592445)

System Administrators:

• ssh now shows a visual fingerprint on all relevant activities, and the .ssh/known_hosts file is hashed for increased security. (openSUSE-factory list)

• cron has been replaced by cronie, which ships as cron-1.4.4 (openSUSE-factory list)

• pam_mount updated to the latest stable version (1.2.4, libHX 2.7). (openFATE 305351, bugzilla 438457)

• KVM/qemu SDL windows no longer freeze. (bugzilla 586260)

Developers/Packagers:

• Update to rpm 4.8.0 (release notes)

• Update to zypper 1.4.1 resolves  issues with ‘zypper ref’ and ‘zypper up’. (bugzilla 586979, bugzilla 591760)

• Update to NetBeans 6.8 in Java:packages. (bugzilla 593600)

• rpmlint properly finds RPM_BUILD_ROOT again. (bugzilla 584952)

Multimedia Authors:

• The JACK team is coordinating with openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Debian, among others, to upgrade to jack 1.9.5 (JACK2) during the spring/summer release cycle. (openSUSE-factory list)

• lilypond is now in multimedia:apps, to support rosegarden4. (openSUSE-factory list)

GUI Users:

• Update to X11 7.5 &  xorg-server to 1.8.0.  (openFATE 306903, bugzilla 586157, bugzilla 586350, bugzilla 587514, bugzilla 576481, bugzilla 593878)

• Added nouveau driver for Nvidia graphics. (openFATE 307588)

• VMWare mouse drivers are functioning again. (bugzilla 574857, bugzilla 592193)

• Update to gutenprint 5.2.4 with support for many new printer models. (openFATE 309091)

• An hplip update resolves deprecation issues related to udev. (bugzilla 577035)

• Update to PCManFM’s (a lightweight file manager)  libfm-0.1.9beta resolves some file access issues. (bugzilla 591731)

• xscreensaver-recommended only installs a recommended subset of screensavers, and is selected by default instead of xscreensaver-extras. (openFATE 308474)

• iwl3945 (an Intel Wireless LAN driver) no longer needs to be reloaded after NetworkManager startup. (bugzilla 586711)

• Gnome 2.30  ’About Me’ no longer looses information. (bugzilla 588172)

• gnome-keyring works properly under LXDE. (bugzilla 580043)

• Update to gnuplot 4.4. (bugzilla 592563)

• Update to seamonkey 2.0.4. (bugzilla 592587)

Mobile Users:

• Update to pm-utils to 1.3.0; power management utilities now use udisks/upower and have no dependencies on HAL; video quirks are included. (openSUSE-factory list)

• NetworkManager has support for PEAP with Generic Token Card (PEAP-GTC). (openFATE 309158)

• Uacklight controls are working in MacBooks with Intel graphics. (bugzilla 581474)

Gamers:

• Added Dungeon Crawl (a nethack clone) to the Games repository. (openSUSE-factory list)

Testing! Testing! Testing!

As this is a milestone release, 11.3 M5 does contain bugs that we know about, but should not stand between courageous contributors and release testing. Some of the most critical bugs are listed on the wiki.

Get Milestone 5 Today!

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