openSUSE 11 Alpha 1

Posted by Sathya

January 20, 2008

With the new year beginning we kick start major development into the next version of openSUSE: openSUSE 11.0. A very early alpha version, Alpha 1, is now available for download and testing.

The Beautiful New Look of the Installer

Despite many other products being developed in parallel to Factory,
we have seen a heavy stream of development on it, so it is really worth
a try if you have time for testing. Note, however, that it is not
suitable for production systems.

Changes since openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 0

We have seen 1026 package check-ins since Alpha0 and countless bugs fixed. The main changes against Alpha0 are:

Sat Solver integration
- Michael Schröder’s “sat solver” library is now the default package
  solver for libzypp, so make sure you doublecheck the selected packages
  - there might be suprises ahead. Please note that we need test cases
  for things that look funny to you (wiki link)
Heavy changes to the appearance of the Qt installation (ported to qt4)
- Note that it’s still in draft state and your feedback is welcome
KDE 4.0.0
perl 5.10
glibc 2.7
NetworkManager 0.7
CUPS 1.3.5
Pulseaudio

Most Annoying Bugs

Due to the huge amount of changes, there are also several noticeable bugs:

The new solver does not yet have a “ignore this requirement”
choice, i.e. it’s not possible to create a broken system. We’re still
discussing if this is a bug or a feature
the CDs lack a huge amount of software. Many packages had to be
taken out to make way for others. The CDs should still have a a
completely working desktop, however.
the Qt port and its theme are early releases and create noticeably
more flickering and drawing glitches, e.g. the progress bar is only
visible on some installations
jpackage packages are broken and one package will complain during installation - just ignore
the installation crashes at the end when creating the x11 proposal:
in this case, your desktop will still have a working X config, it just
might not be the perfect one. You may need to call sax2 after it happens
PPC cannot be installed as the bootloader config can’t be written
out. However, you can get a working PPC system when updating from alpha0