openSUSE 11.1 RC 1 is now available. Here the release announcement:

The openSUSE Project is happy to announce that openSUSE 11.1 RC 1 is now available. If all goes well, this will be the last testing release before the final 11.1 public release on December 18th.

This release includes a number of bugfixes and changes since 11.1 beta 5, as well as a new license.

Call for Testing
We all want openSUSE 11.1 to be the best release yet, and we need your help to get there. This release is ready for widespread testing, and we’re encouraging everyone to download and work with the testing releases to find any critical bugs before release. Please run the release through your usual routine, and let us know about any bugs or other issues that you find.

Remember that this is a release candidate, and is not suitable for use on production systems, however. Though many openSUSE users can and do use the Factory distribution and/or testing releases for day-to-day work we want to stress that it’s entirely possible that you will encounter serious bugs.

See openSUSE.org/Testing for more information on Testing.

To follow the testing and development process, we suggest that you subscribe to the openSUSE-Factory mailing list, and join the #openSUSE-Factory channel on Freenode to discuss openSUSE development.

What’s changed since beta 5?
Major changes in this release include:

* A new, shorter distro license
* Linux kernel 2.6.27.7
* glibc 2.9
* Additional translations
* Amarok 2.0 RC 1
* Zypper 1.0.1

See the Factory News page for changes in the Factory distribution between release announcements. DistroWatch also carries an expanded list of packages being shipped in the Factory distribution.

Media and Download
11.1 RC 1 can be found at http://software.opensuse.org/developer. See http://en.opensuse.org/Mirror_Selection for a full list of mirrors. Note that you don’t need to choose a mirror yourself, but you can use the mirror list if you want or need to select a mirror manually.

Most Annoying Bugs
While many bugs have been eliminated since the last beta, we still have a few remaining (and new) bugs that testers should be aware of:

Bug 448270: the license has no translations yet
Bug 449711: no OpenOffice for ppc
Bug 449422: Amarok2 on KDE4 does not stop
Bug 449513: Novell vpn doesn’t work at novell-ipsec-tools 0.7.1.

Future Release Announcements
Note to openSUSE contributors: If you have any changes or features to call out for future release announcements, please send an email to Zonker with any information that should be in that announcement. (Preferably at least two days before the scheduled release.