Milestone 1, the first step towards the upcoming openSUSE 12.1 release, is now available. It is the first milestone, hence far from stable, but the images are now finally building, so we have a good starting point for further development.
Many updates, systemd still optional
With over 800 updates, including minor and major updates, the current milestone is ready for some serious testing. This iteration already sees some major upgrades taking place, with the kernel moving on to 2.6.39 and GNOME to 3.0. In addition we have popular GNOME applications like Evolution, Eye of GNOME and others all synchronized, and KDE’s Plasma Desktop coming along nicely with a minor version upgrade to 4.6.3. You will also find upgrades to GCC, glibc, Perl, Python, and the RPM package manager. Much work has also been put into the much-lauded systemd which has now been upgraded to version 26.
You can read some info on the progress in this recent blog on progress in Factory by Andreas Jaeger.
Helping out easier than ever!
As expected from a development release, there is still a lot of work to do, so your input at this early stage will be a huge help in making the final release into the beautifully polished work that we aim for. openSUSE 12.1 Milestone 1 has a list of most annoying bugs here, please add issues you find and help fix them. As Will Stephenson recently blogged, fixing an issue is a matter of BURPing on build.opensuse.org! Find a how-to here.