openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 arrives

The openSUSE project release team have announced the arrival of the first milestone release for version 11.4 of their openSUSE operating system. The development preview is the first of six planned milestone releases for the popular Linux distribution, the next of which is expected to arrive on the 30th of September, and will be followed by two release candidates. The final version of openSUSE 11.4 is scheduled to be released in March of 2011.

Aimed at developers, testers and community members, Milestone 1 for openSUSE 11.4's major new feature is the incorporation version 8.1 of Libzypp, with new http and ftp downloading back-end. MultiCurl replaces libzypp's old MediaAria backend and adds support for zsync transfers and better Metalink download support. Metalink allows a package to be downloaded from a number of servers in parallel, while Zsync speeds up downloading packages by only fetching the changed parts of files. Along with improvements in proxy support, the changes should result in faster, more robust and more reliable package downloads in zypper and YaST which both make use of Libzypp.

Other updates in this first milestome include the use of X.org 1.9, version 2.32.0 Beta 1 of GNOME and KDE 4.5. The developers say that the milestone is regarded as "suitable for others to test" but, as with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the development milestone can be found in the official release announcement. The first milestone for openSUSE 11.4 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 11.3 from mid-July.

See also:

• Jos Poortvliet is new openSUSE community manager, a report from The H.
• openSUSE 11.0 reaches end of life, a report from The H.
• What's new in openSUSE 11.3, a feature from The H.

(crve)