SUSE Linux 10 Set to Debut in October

Novell has announced that SUSE Linux 10 will be available starting in early October. The newest release leapfrogs the previous numbered versioning of the product and has been developed through the newly created OpenSUSE effort.

Novell claims that its OpenSUSE effort is working well with thousand of members and bug reports being submitted in order to help improve the Linux distribution.

SUSE Linux 10 will be available for i386, x86_64 and PowerPC architectures and will use the recently released Linux kernel 2.6.13.

The Linux distro will also include Novell’s own Beagle desktop search engine. The usual suspects of openoffice, Mozilla Firefox, Apache, GAIM, Evolution, KDE, GNOME and Mono are also all part of the release.

Novell claims that SUSE Linux 10.0 is stuffed with more than 1,500 open source Linux applications and packages.

The next version follows SUSE Linux Professional release version 9.3, which was announced in March and shipped in April.

At the beginning of August Novell announced that it would be opening up SUSE development under the auspices of the OpenSUSE project. It also announced that it was dropping the term “Professional” from the name of the product, hence the new release is simply called SUSE Linux 10.

Since the announcement of the OpenSUSE project, SUSE Linux 10 development has progressed at a torrid pace. The first OpenSUSE-driven beta release of SUSE Linux 10 was unveiled on August 9th, with beta2 on August 18th, beta 3 a week later on August 25th, beta 4 on September 1st.

This Friday (September 9th), the first release candidate is set to debut and on October 6th the final SUSE Linux 10 product will be released.

Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, Novell director of marketing for Linux and open source, told internetnews.com that there are now over 4,000 registered users at OpenSUSE.org and that number continues to grow. OpenSUSE contributors are making a difference by actively contributing bug reports to the project.

“We’ve received hundreds of bugs from external non-Novell contributors and those bugs get triaged and evaluated just like all the other bugs,” Mancusi-Ungaro said. “The engineers have said that the bug quality we’re getting from these outside contributors is very high, they are well documented and many of them are being fixed in the release.”

Unlike some open source groups that pay a bug bounty (mozilla and ubuntu for example), Novell does not currently pay OpenSUSE contributor for their bug findings.

“You see bug bounties on projects that for whatever reason are losing traction or they are trying to gain new communities,” Mancusi-Ungaro explained. “We have the unusual situation that we have a mature community of users that have been eager to participate. We’ve got great bug flow and we don’t feel the need to prime the pump at this time,” he added.

“We’re delighted with the quality of community input and so far it’s all fitting together just fine.”

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