OpenSUSE News/10.3alpha5-Release

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openSUSE 10.3 Alpha5 has been released!

The openSUSE Team is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 10.3 Alpha5. Though this release should not be used on any production machines, everyone can help shape this release by testing out installations and much more. For more information on the release schedule, take a look at the Roadmap. See below for more information.

Highlights in this Release

KDE and GNOME

• This release contains the very latest KDE 3.5.7 and GNOME 2.18.1.
• openSUSE plans to be among the early adopters of KDE4. As part of this, the currently ported versions of KDE4 games have already been imported into the distribution.

Package Splitting and Renaming

• In order to really slim down a default, base installation, many packages and their dependencies have been altered.

Adding Remote Package Sources during Install

• This release gives you the opportunity to add any additional remote package sources before the installation begins. That means you can select any extra packages you want -- perhaps from the Build_Service or elsewhere -- and have them all properly installed before you begin.

1-CD Installation with GNOME or KDE

• You now also have the option of fully installing openSUSE with a single CD; you can choose a GNOME CD, or the KDE CD, each which provides a complete openSUSE distribution with each respective desktop environment.

Other Technical Changes

• Linux kernel 2.6.22-rc4
• Alsa 1.0.14
• glibc 2.6

For more information and changes, see Factory/News.

Most Annoying Bugs

So far the following critical bugs have been found, please read before you install:

• YaST do not accept the default gpg key by default and asks for import during registration. (bug 283738)
• grub config completely broken on update (bug 283709)
• No remote repository gets added during installation (bug 283740)
• ifup/getcfg are broken, so the traditional network scripts will not work - workaround: Use NetworkManager (bug 283724).
• No NIS offered during installation (bug 270899)

For an up-to-date list of the most annoying bugs, see Bugs:Most Annoying Bugs 10.3-dev.

Participating and Helping

There are many ways to help in contributing to openSUSE. For a full run-down of different ways, see How to Participate.

With this particular release, you can greatly help the openSUSE team and community by trying out this release and reporting any bugs on Bugzilla. Feel free to also file enhancement requests there, and you can file Wishlist requests directly on the Wiki! In particular, test out any of the things below and Communicate to tell us about how things go. The opensuse-factory mailing list will be the most appropriate one for such discussion.

Call for Testing

1-CD Installation

• This new media has only just been added, so all help in reporting bugs is greatly appreciated.

Live DVD

• KIWI allows you to create your very own Live DVDs and CDs from your very own computer! Head over to the LiveDVD page in order to test this out.

Instlux

• Instlux gives you the option of installing openSUSE directly from a Windows installation. Our first tests showed that this might not work under Vista since the binary is not signed. Take care about the uninstaller of the openSUSE installer which gets blocked by Vista Popup Blocker after login.
• Network installation with InstLux is now available and needs some further testing. InstLux Network Installer needs no special media only a working internet connection. The InstLux Network Installer can be found here: openSUSE10_3_NET.exe.

OpenOffice.Org 2.2.1 RC3

• Please test the new version!

libata for IDE devices

• We're using the libata stack now also for IDE controllers. Please do test that an update works and all files are changed automatically (libata uses /dev/sda for the first harddisk instead of /dev/hda). Disks with more than 15 partitions are not handled right now, we're still evaluating whether there is a good solution. To use the old scheme, boot with hwprobe=-modules.pata.

Media and Download

openSUSE 10.3 Alpha5 for i386, x86-64 and ppc comes as different media sets:

• 1 GNOME Installation CD for i386 (NEW!)
• 1 KDE Installation CD for i386 (NEW!)
• 6 CDs (CD 6 was needed due to the increase space of TeXLive)
• 1 AddOn CD with only NonOSS packages on it
• 1 AddOn CD with language packages that are used for extra languages (the 6 CDs contain support for english, french, italian, spanish, german, chinese, japanese, czech, danish, norwegian, khmer, hungarian, polish) (the 6 CDs have support for installation in all languages, just extra packages are only on this extra media)
• 1 DVD containing the contents of the 6 CDs and the NonOSS AddOn CD
• CDs/DVDs containing the sources corresponding to the media

We have created Delta ISOs from openSUSE 10.3 Alpha5. Please use them for download.

The DVDs and the source media are only available via bittorrent.

To get any of these, head over to the Development Version download page.