Following up on Michael Loeffler’s previous RC1 announcement, openSUSE is now doing a final check of instrumentation before landing. The weather continues to be clear and all conditions continue to be smooth, and all systems are a go for final landing on July 15, 2010. Now is the time for us all to download the latest openSUSE RC2 release and all join in on a final check and get that 11.3 polished and in good condition. You can download RC2 from our software portal. You can find our most annoying bugs here. And if you find anything new, please do report it on Bugzilla. The ground crew needs your reports! Have a lot of fun and let’s get to downloading! They’re waiting to greet us at the terminal.

Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seat belts, the touch down area is in sight and we do have clear view and smooth weather conditions in general. So we expect a smooth landing for the release of openSUSE 11.3 on July 15, 2010. Let’s polish and fine-tune openSUSE 11.3 now. Get the RC1 from our software portal right now. As usually the most annoying bugs are listed here. But at least till release time coolo couldn’t find more then one bug in this category. Good sign towards a great release in July. Have a lot of fun!

Milestone 7 (M7), a snapshot of the openSUSE Factory ‘work in progress’ build, leading up to openSUSE 11.3 release in July, is now available for download. M7 is the last milestone release, the next release will be RC1 on June 17th. Now it’s time for testing and bug-fixing! Compared to M6, this milestone brings many bug fixes, an update to Linux kernel 2.6.34 and the integration of software translations and new artwork. Highlights: netbook support with both Moblin and KDE; the approaching Btrfs file system can be configured in the installer; the zypper package management client has seen further improvements; better graphics driver support for NVIDIA cards….

Milestone 6 (M6), a snapshot of the Factory ‘work in progress’ build, leading up to openSUSE 11.3 release in July, is now available for download. M6 is the first release during the ‘Stabilizing Freeze’ – focus has transitioned away from the inclusion of new features and applications toward increasing stability and usability. To that end, 162 bugs were resolved during the M5 – M6 time frame. Updates: the ‘radeon’ video driver has superseded ‘radeonhd’, providing KMS/DRI support; using the ‘radeon’ video driver on an Atom-based system no longer causes graphical corruption; CUPS 1.4.2 now works properly on 64-bit systems….

Milestone 5 (M5), a snapshot of the Factory ‘work in progress’ build, leading up to openSUSE 11.3 release in July, is now available for download. M5 was marked by significant contributions from both the openSUSE community, and the larger Linux community. We’ve added some interesting new packages, made some updates to core processes, and participated in a coordinated multi-distribution upgrade of a major multimedia component. Over 50 bugs were fixed and 8 new features were implemented. Release news: update to Perl 5.12; update to parted 2.2; KMS integration for Intel and NVIDIA (via nouveau driver) graphics….