Late last month we released the first milestone of openSUSE 11.3, now we follow up with the second. Milestone 2 is part of the milestones where we track new releases in the open source universe and test the building of our various distribution images with them. While milestone 1 introduced various pre-release versions of free and open source projects (KDE 4.4 RC1, OpenOffice 3.2 Beta4 or VirtualBox 3.1 beta 1) into our development distribution openSUSE Factory, this milestone is characterized by final releases of those projects. We are also preparing everything to switch to GCC 4.5.0 as the default compiler. Currently our staging version of Factory already builds with it and our compiler people document/fix the most serious issues, they aim at milestone 3 for the switch. To learn more about the benefits of GCC 4.5.0 check the Development Tools section below. As you can see, although we are steadily moving forward, there is still a lot to come!

Go on to read about the detailed changes that happened in the various areas…