Open SUSE 11.4 released

Innovations and video review under the cut

OpenSUSE 11.4 in brief

The latest release of openSUSE 11.4 introduces significant improvements to the underlying infrastructure, such as the Linux kernel version 2.6.37, which has better performance and adds support for the latest hardware, which has become much more productive and more stable than the Zypper package manager and an accelerated system boot process.
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As a desktop environment, openSUSE 11.4 offers both the latest stable versions of KDE 4.6, GNOME 2.32, and LXDE 0.5 and XFCE 4.8. All are part of the officially supported openSUSE release and are equally well built and integrated! In addition to working environments and a huge selection of software, such as LibreOffice 3.3.1, Firefox 4.0 and Scribus 1.4, openSUSE offers excellent system management tools, including the YaST package. YaST makes installing and configuring your system easy, allowing anyone to create their own server, manage virtual machines, or connect to an Active Directory domain.

In addition to the improvements in the distribution itself, the openSUSE community has been working on developing new and improving old projects, such as Tumbleweed and Packman. Tumbleweed is a constantly updated repository for openSUSE 11.4, providing users with the latest stable versions of applications, eliminating the need to search for and use a large number of additional repositories. The third-party Packman repository has undergone a reorganization and has been moved to the private section of the openSUSE assembly service. SUSE Studio will introduce support for 11.4 on the day of release, March 10, so users can create their own openSUSE-based operating systems.

Last but not least, the documentation was significantly improved including a fully updated 'Startup Guide'. For system administrators, openSUSE 11.4 presents a new Virtualization Guide and System Analysis and Optimization Guide.

Other system wide changes

To better support and manage all possible devices that can be added to a modern PC, the HAL hardware abstraction layer in openSUSE has been completely removed and replaced with a modern and powerful family of U-tools, such as udev, upower and udisk.

The boot process has received new tools that provide better performance and ease of use. Among them, systemd, still experimental, but speeding up system loading. (Systemd status wiki page). The latest gfxboot 4.3.5 provides improved support for virtualbox and qemu-kvm. GRUB2 is now available for testing in openSUSE 11.4. Like systemd, it is not yet ready for continuous use, but you can already try them in action.

The traditional Vixie Cron has been replaced by Cronie 1.4.6. Cronie is easier to set up, and it also supports PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) and the SELinux security platform.

Desktop

* KDE SC 4.6.0 / KDEPIM 4.4.10
* Amarok 2.4.0
* KOffice 2.3.1
* Bluedevil - a new utility for working with Bluetooth devices for KDE
* Plasmoid-networkmanagement replaced KNetworkManager
* Oxygen-gtk adds superior visual integration of GTK applications in KDE
* Rekonq - a WebKit-based KDE browser - now included in the main repository.
* KPackageKit replaced KUpdateApplet as an application for checking updates by default.
* PulseAudio is launched by default in the installation with the KDE desktop environment - but you can easily disable it in the YaST Sound module or simply remove it completely
* The standard installation with the KDE desktop environment is no longer HAL dependent - instead udev is used to work with removable devices and power management

The upcoming openSUSE 11.4 release will come with the latest and better version of GNOME 2.32. GNOME 2.32 is the latest release in the GNOME 2.x branch and has a lot of recent enhancements in this branch to provide openSUSE users with a stable foundation for the next 8 months. During this time, the GNOME 3 openSUSE team will be busy preparing for the release of GNOME 3. Look at GNOME 3 and the new GNOME Shell will be possible in openSUSE 11.4.

Other

In addition to kernel updates and low-level utilities, openSUSE provides a huge selection of console and graphics applications. These programs have been updated to the latest versions, thus making openSUSE the first popular distribution that provides such well-known applications like LibreOffice 3.3.1, Firefox 4.0 and Scribus 1.4, which carry many improvements in terms of functionality and stability.

* WebYaST included in main delivery
* SQL plugin for Kate

* KDevelop 4.2
* QtCreator 2

Full list of innovations here

I also propose to view the video review of this OS, unfortunately silent.


You can download from the off site