openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 6 removes RadeonHD driver

The openSUSE developers have released the sixth milestone release for what will become openSUSE 11.3. According to the developers, the latest development preview is the first release during the Stabilising Freeze which focuses on increasing stability and usability. The sixth milestone will be be followed by a seventh on the 21st of May, after which two additional release candidates will be released. The final version of openSUSE 11.3 is scheduled to be available on the 15th of July, 2010.

Interestingly, the RadeonHD Linux driver (xf86-video-radeonhd), which was developed by Novell's developers in conjunction with AMD, has been removed from Novell's own openSUSE distribution. The RadeonHD driver was the first open source driver to fully support the Radeon X1000/R500 series cards. A new Radeon video driver supersedes the older xf86-video-radeonhd and provides KMS/DRI support.

openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 6 also features several KDE, GNOME and LXDE desktop updates and changes, includes version 1.0.0 of OpenSSL and addresses more than 160 bugs, including a buffer overflow issue and suspend problems, from the previous milestone. As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the release, including a list of the Most Annoying Bugs, can be found in the release announcement and change log. openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 6 is available to download for 32 and 64-bit x86 systems as a DVD or LiveCD image from the projects developer / get it section. The latest stable release of openSUSE is version 11.2 from November of 2009.

See also:

• OpenSUSE gets an Upstart, a report from The H.
• openSUSE 11.2 on the test bench, a feature from The H.

(crve)