openSUSE Announces Fifth Development Milestone with Kernel Interactivity Patch

The openSUSE project released the fifth of six milestones in the development of openSUSE 11.4 some days ago. Milestone 5 (M5) brings a wide range of updates, both major and minor. As usual, you can get it here.

Major Features:

• Kernel 2.6.37rc5-12 is the basis of M5, including the famous “200 line” per tty task groups patch to improve desktop interactivity, and featuring the almost-complete removal of the so-called ‘Big Kernel Lock’, which should improve scalability. This kernel supports new drivers, including Broadcom wireless and updated open-source graphics drivers, and a host of the usual other improvements.

• Libzypp 8.10.2 adds improved support and fixes for metalinks, the multiple download URL specification.

• On the desktop, the KDE Platform makes the leap to version 4.6 beta with many improvements in the UI and underlying infrastructure. This includes a complete rewrite of Kontact and is undergoing heavy testing. There is a serious chance KDE PIM 4.6 will not make it into the final openSUSE 11.4 release, testing and development is needed!

• KOffice is updated to 2.3 RC superseding beta1, including the exciting Krita natural media painting app. Meanwhile OpenOffice.org is removed, having been succeeded by LibreOffice which is updated to 3.3.0.1.

• GNOME 2.32.1 is now available as the 2.32.2 is the final version planned for openSUSE 11.4, which is notable for being the last stable release before GNOME 3 in March.

• GNUCash 2.4 RC comes with a new complete dress-up.

• Pidgin updates fixes several MSN and ICQ issues.

• In the Virtualization area, available now are kernel-xen 2.5.37 features and kernel-ec2 2.6.37 with improvements for cloud sync services and Virtual Box 4 Beta including USB devices support and more than 2GB RAM support on 32 bit guest, Intel HD Audio, asynchronous I/O for iSCSI, VMDK, VHD and Parallels image support.

• systemd 15 provides aggressive parallelization capabilities to start multiple daemons at the same time with dependencies which offers improvements to the boot times on some systems. More testing (and porting of init scripts) is still needed for systemd, which will most likely make it into 11.4 as experimental and optional feature.

Get it!

A list of most annoying bugs is being compiled; please check it before installing. We look forward to your bug reports and test experiences! Automated testing and the openSUSE Factory team have been very active to ensure that your download of  M5 will be at least minimally functional, thanks for that! now go and download it!

The next milestone is scheduled for Thursday, Jan 20 2011, and will be the openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6 release. The final openSUSE 11.4 is planned to be released in March 2011.