Author: Shirl Kennedy
For those keeping score, this week saw alpha releases of two of the most popular Linux distros — Ubuntu 7.10 Alpha 3 and openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 6.
Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 3, destined to become Ubuntu 7.10, “is the third in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Gutsy development cycle,” according to the release announcement.
While “known to be reasonably free of show-stopper CD build or installer bugs,” this development release is not for the timid — or anyone requiring a stable system. As usual, testers, developers, and the curious are welcome to download, install, tinker and report/fix bugs. New features needing testing include:
- The latest Compiz Fusion.
- GNOME 2.19.5, the alpha release of what will become GNOME 2.20.
- AppArmour, an access control security framework.
- Ebox, a user-friendly network services control tool.
Get ISOs and torrents on the releases page. Third alphas of Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu are also available. The final release is expected in October.
According to the openSUSE 10.3 Alpha 6 release announcement, this is the first alpha “containing the new refactored libzypp software management library.” The developers encourage thorough testing and bug reporting of libzypp/zypper, notably integration into YaST.
The “most annoying bugs” you’ll encounter in this release are broken network setup, lack of a public key for checking release-notes.rpm, broken registration, GNOME 2.19 work-in-progress status, and “‘Add default repositories’ crashes the installation.”
The developers note that “this might be the first alpha we release with known alpha quality.” You’ll find various download media on the openSUSE Web site.
Categories:
- Distributions
- SUSE/openSUSE
- Ubuntu
