Download Suse Linux 10.1 beta 4

The developers of the OpenSuse community released the fourth beta version of Suse Linux 10.1 a few days ago. The previous version, Suse Linux 10.0, added “OSS” to the title, which stood for Open-Source Software, indicating that all non-open-source components are not included. These include the Sun Java Runtime Environment, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Macromedia Flash Player, and components that depend on them, such as OpenOffice.org. With this version, that addition disappears again because there was confusion whether two flavors would become available, one with OSS and one without OSS designation. However, the non-open source components are not included with Suse Linux 10.1, they can be obtained separately from this location. The announcement on the mailing list looks like this:

I’m glad to announce that we finally have a Beta4 available. Beta4 has a number of ROUGH edges, so read the following before you decide to download and test it. I advise not to put it on any production system!

Beta4 is really for the adventurous experts and not for anybody without a good Linux experience:

• The CD 1 needs to remain in the CD drive after installing from it. Do not remove it during the reboot and wait for YaST to request CD 2.
  Otherwise the installation of packages from CD 2-5 will fail afterwards.
• Due to the integration of the new package manager which is not complete, note the following non working pieces:
  • Only a fresh installation is supported. Update from a previous installation is not working!
  • ncurses installation is not supported right now
  • Some statistics do not work, eg you see “Size of packages to install: 0” – or “Number of packages to install: 0”, or “Software: Default system (0)”.
  • The graphical package manager frontend has only a limited list of “views”, currently you get a list of all the packages and can only search in them.
  • Only adding of selections works. If you want to remove a selection, remove all packages in that selection and run the resolver manually with the “Check” button.
  • Language dependent packages are not handled correctly. This results in the installation of one package-$lang package but not necessarily the one for the languages ​​asked for.
  • It is not possible to abort installation while installing packages.
  • Network Installations: smb/cifs does not work, http, nfs and ftp should work.
  • There are cases where during an ftp installation from the FACTORY tree packages for the wrong architecture get installed
• The partitioner is broken in some cases which might result in:
  • mixed up filesystem types – for example one chooses ext2 and the partition is getting formatted with reiserfs
  • creates double or totally obscure entries within the fstab of the system
  • makes improper proposals for a standard partitioning
• There are no Release Notes shown – and the download of them fails.

Summing up: The installer is in a rather bad shape, only INSTALLATION is supported – and the partitioner has some regressions as well. The rest of the system should be stable.

Further information and updates are available from http://www.opensuse.org/Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs

We also renamed the directories and filenames to remove the “OSS” from the names to make it clear that there’s only one SUSE Linux.

Andrew Jager
SUSE Linux Products GmbH[break]The following downloads are available:
Suse Linux 10.1 beta 4 – i386 (cd 1 2 3 4 5 – torrent)
Suse Linux 10.1 beta 4 – x86_64 (cd 1 2 3 4 5 – torrent)
Suse Linux 10.1 beta 4 – ppc (cd 1 2 3 4 5 – torrent)