Leap Micro Beta Available for Testers

People browsing through openSUSE’s websites may spot something new on get.opensuse.org.

Leap Micro, which is currently showing the 5.2 beta version, is for containerized and virtualized workloads. It is immutable and ideal for host-containers and described as an ultra-reliable, lightweight operating system that experts can use for compute deployments. The community version of Leap Micro is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro and leverages the enterprise hardened security of twins SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE Leap, which merges this to a modern, immutable, developer-friendly OS platform.

Leap Micro has several use cases for edge, embedded/IoT deployments and more. Leap Micro is well suited for decentralized computing environments, microservices, distributed computing projects and more. The release will help developers and IT professionals to build and scale systems for uses in aerospace, telecommunications, automotive, defense, healthcare, robotics, blockchain and more. Leap Micro provides automated administration and patching.

Leap Micro has similarities of MicroOS, but Leap Micro does not offer a graphical user interface or desktop version. It is also based on SUSE Linux Enterprise and Leap rather than a variant of Tumbleweed, which MicroOS bases its release on.

Leap release manager Luboš Kocman announced the availability of the images on the factory mailing list.

Users wanting to test out Leap Micro should look at the openSUSE wiki page. Those using a preconfigured image with Raspberry Pi or Intel bases should view the combustion and ignition documentation. Users will need to label the volume name ignition on the usb-drive. This can be done via disk utility (format partition) or sudo e2label /dev/sdY ignition. If the config.ign file has the following: passwordHash : O9h4s2UUtAtok, the password will be password. Leap Micro has the current openSUSE default, which is PermitRootLogin = without-password. Therefore users need to supply a pubkey via combustion; this is a known issue and will be fixed.

Users should know that zypper is not used with Leap Micro, but transactional-update is used instead.