"This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 11 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge."

"We tested both the GNOME and KDE flavors of OpenSUSE 11 by installing from the Live CD images. These work reasonably well and provide an installation experience comparable to that of Ubuntu and Fedora. The few minor issues that we encountered when we tested the beta 2 live installers back in May have all been resolved. There is also a full installer that is offered as a 4.3 GB DVD image. It provides a highly polished visual interface and an enormous package selection. For most users, who only require one desktop environment, the live installers are probably more practical than the full installer."

"The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 11.0 — everything you need to get started with Linux on the desktop and on the server. Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, the openSUSE Project provides free, easy access to the world’s most usable Linux distribution, openSUSE.

The 11.0 release of openSUSE includes more than 200 new features specific to openSUSE, a redesigned installer that makes openSUSE even easier to install, faster package management thanks to major updates in the ZYpp stack, and KDE 4, GNOME 2.22, Compiz Fusion, and much more.

On the Desktop
Whether you use GNOME or KDE, the openSUSE 11.0 desktop is a beautiful experience. Users have the choice of GNOME 2.22, KDE 4, KDE 3.5, Xfce, and more! See the screenshot page for a in-depth look at the openSUSE desktop.

GNOME 2.22
GNOME users will find a lot to like in openSUSE 11.0. openSUSE’s GNOME is very close to upstream GNOME, because Novell and openSUSE want to do as much work as possible in the upstream release. However, we do modify GNOME’s artwork to provide a unified look and feel for the distro. The default GNOME configuration, such as panel layout, is slightly different than “stock” GNOME, and the openSUSE GNOME team backports a number of bug fixes into our GNOME release to ensure stability and the best possible GNOME experience.

GNOME 2.22 in openSUSE 11.0 includes the GNOME Virtual File System (GVFS), with better support for networked file systems, PulseAudio for better sound management, improvements in Evolution and Tomboy, and much more!

KDE 4.0
openSUSE 11.0 is the first openSUSE release to include a stable release of KDE 4.0. This release includes sweeping changes in the KDE desktop, and represents the next generation of KDE. This release includes a new desktop shell, called Plasma, a new look and feel (called Oxygen), and many interface and usability improvements.

KControl has been replaced with Systemsettings, which makes system configuration much easier. KDE’s window manager, KWin, now supports 3-D desktop effects.

KDE 4.0 doesn’t include KDEPIM applications, so the openSUSE team has included beta versions of the KDEPIM suite (KMail, KOrganizer, Akregator, etc.) from the KDE 4.1 branch that’s in development and scheduled to be released in July.

Note that KDE 3.5 is still available on the openSUSE DVD for KDE users who aren’t quite ready to make the leap to KDE 4."

"With openSUSE 11.0 just a few days away, it’s time to look at one of the stars of the show: KDE. In openSUSE 11.0, you get two KDEs for the price of one. Here we’ll take a look at what’s coming in KDE, and talk to one of openSUSE’s KDE contributors, Stephan Binner."

"2008 will be a very good vintage for community end-user Linux distributions. So far, we’ve seen the release of Ubuntu 8.04, which is universally considered to be a major milestone release in usability and device compatibility, and one of the easiest distros to install. While not as widely lauded, we have also recently seen the release of Fedora Core 9, Red Hat’s community development and bleeding edge technology testing platform, which was the first to implement the production release of KDE 4.0 as well as pilot the development version of the Ext4 journaling filesystem."

"I have been an avid openSUSE user in the past as it worked perfectly on my main workstation. However, I switched to Xubuntu as I'm more obsessed with speed and simplicity nowadays more than anything else. Since the latest version of openSUSE is about to be released and it promises some major enhancements over its predecessor, I decided to take a look at my former favorite distro to see what's been going on.

openSUSE 11 (Release Candidate) is out already, so it's the one that I grabbed. At first, I was still contemplating on which flavor to get since openSUSE is available in both Gnome and KDE Live CD versions. I usually go for GNOME, but this time I got the KDE 32-bit edition. My main reason for this is that I wanted to finally try out the much talked about KDE 4."

"The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the openSUSE 11.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1). The good news is that we’re closing in on the final release of 11.0, but it’s not time to relax just yet. We’re getting really close, so we need all hands on deck to help test this release candidate. Since beta 3 we’ve fixed 578 bugs and resolved 1,118 bugs! Read on to see how you can help get 11.0 into top shape."

"Over 700 bugs were fixed since beta 2, more new artwork was added and several new package versions were includes. The live installation has seen great improvements and should work flawless now.

For screenshots and additional information, see the news posting at:
http://en.opensuse.org/Screenshots/openSUSE_11.0_Beta3

Remember that this is a beta. It may not be safe to run for production systems, and should be used by users interested in testing the next release of openSUSE for bugs.

Media and Download
===============

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 3 for i386, x86-64 and PPC comes as different media sets, all of which can be downloaded from:
http://software.opensuse.org/developer

Deltas from Beta 3 are also provided at
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0-Beta3/iso/delta/ "

"The openSUSE team is proud to announce the second Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! New changes include countless bug fixes, as well as the import of the new openSUSE 11.0 artwork for login, splash screens and more. The live installation should work, but there are several known quirks, so be sure to check the most annoying bugs list before proceeding."

"The openSUSE team is proud to announce the first Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! There are many exciting enhancements and features in the new release. Among these is the incredibly fast package management (libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new installer, installable live CDs and much more.

The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes quite a few changes and new features that users will find interesting, including:

KDE 4 and KDE 3.5: The openSUSE 11.0 beta 1 includes KDE 4.0.3, which includes a number of new features, fixes, and optimizations. See the KDE4 page for more info on the KDE4 branch. To help test, see the wiki for info on reporting bugs in KDE. Not quite ready to move to KDE4? No worries, the beta includes an installation option for KDE 3.5 in addition to KDE4.

GNOME 2.22: Beta 1 includes GNOME 2.22.1 with plenty of new features and packages. Interested in helping with testing for GNOME in openSUSE 11.0? See the wiki for all the info you need.

YaST ported to Qt4: openSUSE’s administration and installation tool, YaST, has been ported to Qt4, providing beautiful styling for the installer, and an improved look for areas such as package management."

"Dear opensuse-security-announce subscribers and SUSE Linux users,

SUSE Security announces that SUSE Linux 10.1 will be discontinued soon. Having provided security-relevant fixes for more than two years, vulnerabilities found in SUSE Linux 10.1 after May 15th 2008 will not be fixed any more for this product. We expect to release the last updates around May 30th 2008.

Please do not confuse SUSE Linux 10.1 with the SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 family of products, these are different products and follow different policies.

As a consequence, the SUSE Linux 10.1 distribution directory on our ftp server ftp.suse.com will be moved from /pub/suse/10.1/ to the /pub/suse/discontinued/ directory tree structure to free space on our mirror sites. The 10.1 directory in the update tree /pub/suse/update/10.1 will follow, as soon as all updates have been published.

The discontinuation of SUSE Linux 10.1 enables us to focus on the SUSE Linux and openSUSE distributions of a newer release dates to ensure that our users can continuously take advantage of the quality that they are used to with SUSE Linux products.

This announcement holds true for SUSE Linux 10.1 only. As usual, SUSE will continue to provide update packages for the following products:

openSUSE 10.2
openSUSE 10.3
and
openSUSE 11.0 (currently in development)

for a two-year period after the release of the respective distribution.

Please note that the maintenance cycles of SUSE Linux Enterprise products and products based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system are not affected by this announcement and have longer life cycles.

To learn more about SUSE Linux business products, please visit http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/ . For a detailed list of the life cycles of our Enterprise Products please visit http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/ and http://support.novell.com/lifecycle/lcSearchResults.jsp?sl=suse "

"The third alpha of openSUSE 11 was announced yesterday, so while I was puttering about the house before bedtime I downloaded the ISO, specifically the KDE live CD. I then burned the ISO and rebooted europa with my newly minted CD. That's when I ran into my first problem.

I don't know when it first cropped up, but the kernel driver for my NEC DVD/CD burner seems to be broken. While I can use it as a normal DVD/CD burner and player after Linux has booted, using it as the boot device results in failure. It refused to boot in either normal or safe mode using the NEC. It's a good thing I have two DVD/CD devices on europa. The second is an older LiteOn DVD/CD device that will only burn CDROMs. So I swapped the openSUSE CD to the second drive and sure enough, it booted without further ado. openSUSE finished at the graphical KDE 4.0.2 desktop. I poked it prodded it for about 10 minutes and didn't discover anything horribly wrong, then shut 'er down and got some sleep."

"Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2
The highlight of course is the reworked ZYpp framework, which gives you a much faster package management experience. This release also contains a new and professional installer theme.

A lot of packages were also updated to newer versions:

linux kernel 2.6.25-rc5
GCC 4.3 final
GNOME 2.22 final
Compiz 0.7.2
KDE 4.0.2/3.5.9
Zypper 0.10.2
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There were 1855 checkins since Alpha2 - you can get a more complete list at Factory/News"

"Only three weeks after Alpha1, we’re glad to announce the release of openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2. There are various exciting changes in there that we would like to have feedback on.

Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 1

KDE 4.0.1 replaced KDE 3.5.8 as default KDE
GNOME 2.21.90 was integrated
Continued work on the Installation workflow
Live CDs for both GNOME and KDE
CDs support German as an additional language
DVDs have only OSS software
Linux 2.6.24
OpenOffice.org 2.4 Beta
Alsa 1.0.16rc2
D-Bus 1.2rc2

For a more detailed list with links to backported packages, see the Factory/News wiki page."

"With the new year beginning we kick start major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0 (roadmap). A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing.

Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory, we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth a try if you have time for testing. Note, however, that it is not suitable for production systems."

"With the release of an nmap bugfix on December 20 we have released the last update for SUSE Linux 10.0.

It is now officially discontinued and out of support.

SUSE Linux 10.0 was released begin of October 2005.

Some statistics on the released patches:

Total: 666 (311 active) (+12)
Security: 529 (223 active) (+31)
Recommended: 124 ( 79 active) (+16)
Optional: 13 ( 9 active) (-35)

Top issues (compared to 9.3 for some issues):
17 clamav (0)
12 opera (0)
12 MozillaFirefox (-1)
12 apache2-mod_php4 (-3)
12 php5 (0)
9 kernel (-1)
8 xorg-x11-server (+2)
8 squirrelmail (-1)
8 phpMyAdmin (0)
8 MozillaThunderbird (+1)
8 ImageMagick (+1)
8 ethereal (-1)
7 openssl (new)
7 OpenOffice_org (+1)
7 java-1_5_0-sun (+2)
7 cups (new)
6 xine-lib (-1)
6 samba (new)
6 qt3 (new)
6 openssh
6 mozilla
6 java-1_4_2-sun (+1)
6 horde
6 gpg
5 xpdf
5 timezone
5 ruby
5 release-notes
5 poppler
5 mediawiki
5 libextractor
5 krb5
5 kdegraphics3-pdf
5 gpg2
5 bind
5 beagle
5 apache2
... 4 or less occurences ..."

"With the release of the python/pcre bugfix/security fix update we have now released the last maintenance update for SUSE Linux Desktop 1.0.

SUSE Linux Desktop 1.0 is now at its End Of Life, support is discontinued, and no more updates will be published.

So lets take a look back at its history...

SUSE Linux Desktop 1.0 was released end of May 2003, making its lifetime 4.5 years.

SLD 1.0 was the first true enterprise desktop SUSE published, previously existed just a lesser known add-on called SUSE Linux Office Desktop.

Currently the following SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop products exist and are in maintenance (regular / extended maintenance):
- Novell Linux Desktop 9 (until July 30th 2009/2011)
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (until July 31st 2011/2013)

Some interesting things:
- SLEC had a 50% package difference against UL1 core (411 additional source rpms, vs around 800 for UL1). NLD9 has around 17% (271:1570), SLED 10 has 0%.

- SLEC had a seperate kernel branch and stayed at 2.4.19 while SLES 8 went to 2.4.21.

Some bad things security wise:
- We were not able to update RealPlayer to RealPlayer 9 to fix security issues because version 9 does not work with the old glibc version. (glibc 2.3 vs 2.2.5)

- We had to stop updating Acrobat Reader to version 7 for the same reason.

- We were unable to continue upgrading Mozilla to after the Mozilla 1.7.x release due to mismatching gtk2 and xft library requirements.

Some statistics regarding our online updates:

Total: 380 (240 active)
Security: 324 (200 active)
Recommended: 41 ( 34 active)
Optional: 15 ( 6 active)

Top issues:
21 kernel
12 ImageMagick
12 cups
9 samba
8 gpg
7 openssh
7 mozilla (would have scored higher, see notes)
7 heimdal
6 rsync
6 libpng
6 java2
6 gaim
5 XFree86-server
5 openssl
5 OpenOffice_org
5 MPlayer
5 mc
4 XFree86-libs
4 qt3
4 libtiff
4 koffice-wordprocessing
4 kdelibs3
4 acroread (would have scored higher, see notes)
... others below 4 ...

Ciao, Marcus Meissner"

"We’d like to kick start the development of openSUSE 11.0 by releasing the current state of Factory as an Alpha0 release. Since the release of 10.3, we checked in 2187 packages including fundamental package updates such as:

gcc 4.3.0
kernel 2.6.24-rc4
X.org 7.3
KDE 3.5.8
KDE 4.0 RC1
CUPS 1.3.4
gdb 6.7.1
Alsa 1.0.15
Gimp 2.4
Yast2 2.16

The change between 10.3 and Alpha0 is quite big, but it still works pretty nicely. So please join the openSUSE 11.0 development in downloading, testing and using Alpha0 or daily updated Factory distribution."

"The live version of openSUSE 10.3 is now available as a GNOME or KDE CD. Both contain the same software as the 1 CD installation versions would provide you with, but as a live version.

The live system can be used as a productive system or rescue system. You can also use it to just check out how openSUSE 10.3 runs on your computer without touching your hard drive. The Live CDs are available as 32bit versions in US English only and also contain, for the first time, an install option on the desktop. You can see a screenshot of the KDE Live CD below:

If you click on the Install icon you will be guided through the installation of openSUSE 10.3 onto your hard drive.

For now the images are available at:

openSUSE 10.3 GNOME Live
openSUSE 10.3 KDE Live

The Live CDs version will be incorporated into software.openSUSE.org over the next few days.

Have a lot of fun!
The openSUSE team"

"This is a detailed description about how to set up an OpenSUSE 10.3 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of OpenSUSE 10.3, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well."