openSUSE 11.3 Hits Milestone 4 – Only 3 More To Go

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Novell’s openSUSE community Linux distribution is moving steadily and surely towards its 11.3 release which is scheduled for July 15th.

Sure that’s still a long way off and Fedora 13 and Ubuntu’s Lucid Lynx will likely grab more than their fair share of headlines before openSUSE 11.3 is out – but the structured methodical milestone method that openSUSE uses for releases makes it really interesting to follow.

In total, openSUSE developer have planned for 7 milestone releases. The first milestone came out in late January and a new milestone has been released nearly every three weeks ever since. It’s a system that in my view delivers a predictable and long-view of development (maybe too long) ahead of the final release.

For Milestone 4, the big change is the swtich to ‘upstart’ as the init daemon for the distribution. Both Fedora and Ubuntu have been using upstart (which is faster in many respects than the legacy approach) for some time, so it’s good to see the change in openSUSE.