After 11 months of grueling work, openSUSE is pleased to announce the first Release Candidate for openSUSE 12.2 on the ARM architecture. After discussing ARM first at the openSUSE Conference in 2011, the openSUSE ARM team has managed to bring up openSUSE from nowhere to being a truly usable and functional distribution on the ARM version 7 architecture in time for the new openSUSE Conference in Prague next month!

Hardware and device support

This RC1 release is focused on ARMv7 which encompasses the Cortex-A processor profile from the Cambridge, UK based chip designer. Due to the current nature of the existing ARM landscape it doesn’t mean that all devices that use a v7 SoC are supported though. As such openSUSE took the engineering decision to focus on a subset of devices to minimize the time it takes to bring the distribution up on the architecture. The supported SoC vendors for this release are Texas Instruments’ OMAP3 & OMAP4, Marvell ArmadaXP 510 and Freescale I.MX51; the supported devices running with these SoCs are the Beagleboard, Beagleboard-xM, Pandaboard, Pandaboard-ES and the EfikaMX smarttop/smartbook. There is also an image for the VersatileExpress which is suitable for use in Qemu as well as a generic root file system tarball that users and developers may use to help bring up unsupported devices. The images are available from the download section, the .xz archive files contain the full image (filesystem + kernel + initrd) and the .tar.bz do NOT contain a filesystem (kernel + initrd only).