openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 2 released

Originally expected for the 30th of September, the openSUSE Project release team has announced the release of the second milestone for version 11.4 of their openSUSE operating system. This development preview is the second of six planned milestone releases for the popular Linux distribution, the next of which is expected on the 5th of November, and will be followed by two release candidates. The final version of openSUSE 11.4 is scheduled for March of 2011.

Aimed at developers, testers and community members, openSUSE Milestone 2 (M2) is based on version 2.6.36rc4 of the Linux kernel and features GNOME 2.31.92, KDE SC 4.5.1 (the latest release is version 4.5.2 from early October) as well as various package updates, such as Python 2.7, Firefox 3.6.10 and Inkscape 0.48. Other package updates include KOffice 2.2.2, Qt 4.7 and the version 3.3 Alpha of the OpenOffice.org office suite. The developers also note that version 1.4 of the D-Bus message bus system has added support for systemd and addresses some threading issues that caused problems in 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, including a full list of changes, can be found in the official release announcement. The second 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 is openSUSE 11.3 from mid-July.

See also:

• Smeegol 1.0 arrives to make Meego more openSUSEy, a report from The H.
• What's new in openSUSE 11.3, a feature from The H.

(crve)