openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 2 has been released:

I'm glad to announce the second public alpha release of openSUSE 10.3.

openSUSE 10.3 Alpha2 is an important milestone for us since it is an installable release so that everybody doing development in the last weeks can double check that their changes not only work in their own environment but also in the complete distribution. It also shows us the state of STABLE so that everybody should be able to use STABLE as basis for their work.

Call for testing:

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". See below for Bug 250241 as well.

For the first time, we do also release the Kiwi tool together with a configuration for creating a LiveDVD of openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 2. It can be created by anyone, you just need to call one simple script. Please find detailed instructions and a list of known issues here: http://en.opensuse.org/LiveDVD

Most annoying bugs for now:

* Branding and translations are still at the 10.2 level Bug 240598

* ide-disk module does not get loaded at installation time. A "modprobe ide-disk" on commandline does workaround this issue. This affects all older IDE chipsets which are not supported via libata, like chipsets used in virtualisation applications Bug 250241

* Firefox on x86-64 does not connect to any website Bug 249686

* KDE-Multimedia is not selected for KDE by default Bug 253022

* GNOME main menu does crash direct after login. Select to delete it, then right click on the panel, select add to panel and then choose menu bar to get a menu. We've put older gnome-main-menu RPMS to http://download.opensuse.org://distribution/10.3-Alpha2/Extra-RPMs

* GNOME installation fails to install gail package, just click ignore

* Some GNOME applications will crash when closing them. As a result, bug buddy will show up. Do not use bug buddy to report these bugs, but rather go to bugzilla.novell.com and search to see if the bug has already been reported.

The list of annoying bugs is found here as well, please update it if you find more:

http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs_10.3-dev

openSUSE 10.3 Alpha1 comes in different medias:
* 5 CDs
* 1 AddOn CD with only NonOSS packages on it
* 1 AddOn CD with language packages that are used for extra
languages (the 5 CDs contain support for english, french, italian, spanish, german, chinese, japanese, czech, danish, norwegian, khmer, hungarian, polish) (the 5 CDs have support for installation in all languages, just extra packages are only on this extra media)
* 1 DVD containing the contents of the 5 CDs and the NonOSS AddOn CD
* CDs/DVDs containing the sources corresponding to the media

We have created Delta ISOs from openSUSE 10.3 Alpha1. Please use them for download.

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

Please report all bugs you find on in our bugzilla as explained in http://bugs.opensuse.org, discussion is most appropriate on the opensuse-factory@xxxxxxxxxxxx mailing list.

To download media, please use the links provided at:
http://en.opensuse.org/Development_Version#Downloads

The next planned release is Alpha3 in four weeks (April 12th),

Andreas