As was already blogged by Vincent Untz, a few weeks after our last milestone was released as beta 1, the first Release Candidate of openSUSE 12.1 is now floating over the web!

What’s new

The next release of openSUSE is expected to bring a large number of improvements and changes. Many of these are the ‘usual’ updates any Linux distribution offers. These include the latest Firefox, GNOME 3.2 and KDE’s Plasma Workspace 4.7. Under the hood, we have Linux kernel 3.1 and we expect to be the first to ship Google’s new programming language Go. We also overhauled our boot procedure introducing systemd and Grub2 (testing!) and of course we’ll ship the latest developer tools and libraries as well as all the sysadmin goodies openSUSE is known for!

But we also have some really unique treats. The coolest among those is Snapper, a btrfs-based tool which allows you to view the differences between current and previous versions of files on your system and lets you roll back the changes, bringing back lost files or undoing damaging overwrites.

Testing

The changes in underlying boot technology, the new tools like Snapper as well as the rest of the operating system need a good workout for the release! So now we need YOUR help! Go to the download page and grab your copy of openSUSE 12.1 RC1 and test it on your desktop, in a VM or on a laptop!

You can find information on testing on the openSUSE Testing wiki page which also includes a link to the most annoying 12.1 bugs. Help us shorten that list by re-testing the problematic areas or by fixing the bugs; or help us find new pressing issues!

Get openSUSE 12.1 RC1 from this page.

More information and other helping-out

The openSUSE 12.1 Portal page has been set up but still needs quite some work. There are screenshots to be taken, release notes to be written and Documentation to be composed. We also welcome help with translation!