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OpenSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 released
Aug. 07, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO -- The OpenSUSE project celebrated its second birthday on Aug. 7 by making the first beta of OpenSUSE 10.3 available at the LinuxWorld trade show here.

OpenSUSE 10.3 is a bleeding-edge Linux operating system based on Linux kernel 2.6.22.1 with a large variety of the latest open-source applications for desktops, servers and application development. Novell is OpenSUSE's corporate backer, and uses OpenSUSE as the foundation for its SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) line.

The beta marks the feature-complete milestone for OpenSUSE 10.3. Perhaps the most interesting late addition to OpenSUSE was the inclusion of a new version of OpenOffice 2.3 beta. This OpenOffice includes the ability to read and write to Open XML files. Novell, with its partnership with Microsoft, has been working on ODF (Open Document Format) and Open XML translators for some time

"We appreciate all the contributions the community has made to the OpenSUSE project during the past two years," said Michael Loeffler, OpenSUSE product manager at Novell, based in Waltham, Mass. "The goal of the OpenSUSE project is to promote the use of Linux everywhere, and our strong community of developers, testers, writers, translators, artists and users have been instrumental in creating one of the world's best Linux distributions."

The first beta of OpenSUSE 10.3 is now available at the OpenSUSE download site.

Loeffler also said OpenSUSE has been making great progress with its OpenSUSE Build Service. Now with more than 700 projects and 20,000 software packages, the OpenSUSE Build Service is a framework software developers can use to easily create and compile packages for multiple Linux distributions. The development team Aug. 7 released the first version of the user interface for the build service, which enables users of any OpenSUSE, SLED, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu or Mandriva distribution to easily search and browse new software for their distribution.

"As we seek to streamline and improve collaboration between all Linux developers, the OpenSUSE Build Service has changed the way packages have been built. The build service is quickly becoming a center for building any Linux distribution," Loeffler said. OpenSUSE 10.3 users will be able to install their software with one click directly from the Web interface. In the past four months, more than 13 million packages have been downloaded from the OpenSUSE Build Service as developers build packages for various distributions using the tool.

Advanced Micro Devices has helped sponsor the progress of the OpenSUSE Build Service with leading-edge hardware and development expertise. "AMD is helping to ensure that the OpenSUSE Build Service continues to be an important collaboration and development platform for developers of all distributions," Terri Hall, vice president of Commercial Systems Marketing for AMD, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., said in a statement. "AMD recognizes the value of the open-source development model, and by providing hardware for the OpenSUSE Build Service, we are able to actively participate in the continued innovation for which the open-source community is known."

Developers who want to provide their software to a broader audience of Linux users are often hampered when packages built for one distribution will not work on other distributions. The OpenSUSE Build Service is the only open-source build system that helps developers provide packages with the same high quality for multiple distributions from the same source code. With the system imaging tool KIWI, open-source developers can more quickly build a Linux distribution that meets their needs, rigorously test it to ensure product quality and easily package it for quick installation.

The OpenSUSE Build Service is completely open source, giving developers and users free and full access to build their choice of Linux packages, whether based on OpenSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu or other projects. An essential part of the OpenSUSE project, the OpenSUSE Build Service is available at its home site. The new end-user interface can be found at OpenSUSE's software site.


Steven J. Vaughan Nichols



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