openSUSE 10.3 Has Been Released

openSUSE 10.3 has been released with a new single KDE installation CD option. It has an excellent delivery of KDE with the latest stable KDE 3.5.7 and the first parts of KDE 4: games, KRDC and KRFB. KDEPIM has also been upgraded to the enterprise branch, providing a few new features and countless fixes.

A full KDE 4 preview is available on the DVD or from the online repositories. Other notable changes include Amarok with MP3 support out-of-the-box, a new 1-click-install technology, OpenOffice.org 2.3, and beautiful green artwork. Furthermore, a typical default boot time to a KDM screen has been decreased from a painful 50+ seconds in openSUSE 10.2, to a super-fast 24 seconds in openSUSE 10.3.


It's included in Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon as well.

By Jannick Kuhr at Sat, 2007/10/06 - 5:00am

And in the upcoming Fedora 8 too, and most likely soon as an update to Fedora 7 and possibly 6 too.

By Kevin Kofler at Mon, 2007/10/08 - 5:00am

It will land in Fedora 7 updates-testing with the next push.

By Kevin Kofler at Tue, 2007/10/09 - 5:00am

More correct would be "the companies of the Kolab Konsortium".

By Anonymous at Sat, 2007/10/06 - 5:00am

no, "the Kompanies of the Kolab Konsortium".


By Jos Poortvliet at Sun, 2007/10/07 - 5:00am

The enterprise version actually works. ;-)

The regular kdepim 3.5.7 has annoying bugs like http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126182 which aren't there in the kdepim-enterprise branch. We've pushed a build from the enterprise to Rawhide (the development version of Fedora, currently heading towards Fedora 8) for that reason and are probably going to push it as an update to our stable releases too.


Certainly opensuse is a great distro written by extremely talented people, but I'm very attached to my kubuntu, since it was my first foray into linux. Still, there are certainly areas that opensuse excels in, where other distros should sit up and take note.

One is definitely the slick artwork, which is extremely pleasing on the eye.
Another is that fantastic Swiss knife known as YaST, which offers nice neat options for configuring various parts of the system. I know work was started by ubuntu devs to port it, but when will there be a chance of this appearing in Kubuntu? System settings is nice, but it would be great to have this as an options as well. I know even Oracle is porting YaST for their Red Hat rip-off, which underlines its broad appeal.

By Jimmy Stretton at Sat, 2007/10/06 - 5:00am

System Settings is just an alternative to KControl and not a replacement for Yast (although there's some slight overlapping of functionality). Since Yast has been published under the GPL some time ago nobody is stopping other distributors from integrating it into their products (other than NIH syndrome). That said, I would like to see a tighter integration between KControl and Yast in the future (KDE4?) versions of openSUSE. The unified look of the control center, application browser and Yast in the GNOME version is very appealing and makes the desktop look much more coherent.

By Erunno at Sat, 2007/10/06 - 5:00am

Indeed this is what I mean - unify System Settings into YaST and make it available on other KDE-based distros. This program is too good to be on Suse-based systems alone :)


While that would be fantastic, porting seems to be very time-consuming; some developers tried porting yast to debian a while back but gave up due to lack of resources :(

By Pat Barnes at Sat, 2007/10/06 - 5:00am


Uh, there's no NIH syndrome at all. A lot of people simply don't like YaST from a technical point of view (aka, "this file was generated by YaST, do not edit").

By Reply at Mon, 2007/10/08 - 5:00am

And that is a technical reason to stay away from something that good?

Then work with the Yast team and explain what you would prefere.

One thing I would like is a list over changed files after a yast module has been executed. We'll se if that comes along sometime :-)


By birger at Mon, 2007/10/15 - 5:00am

There have been already efforts to port Yast to Debian and more recently Ubuntu, but they never go too far due to lack of resources as you need a bunch of people that understand the various parts of *both* systems very well.

YaST has really two sides; the framework --a interpreter for its own programming language (YCP) and a set of libraries that range from editing files to the interface ones which hook to Qt, ncurses and now GTK too--, and then you have the actual tools (done in YCP -- some in the Perl bindings) that implement an interface and apply user's actions.

Most efforts start by porting the framework, which is the fun part, but then get stuck as they port the several tools, because there are some significant differences between the distros, as well as a lot of small ones which are just as a hassle to work out. And as Suse has a bunch of guys working on it, and you want to merge their fixes and improvements, its hard to keep up, and it also means you don't want to work on top of an old effort.
Unless you have an actual commitment from Canonical or whatever, I don't see this happening.

By Brush at Sat, 2007/10/06 - 5:00am

If there are so many Red Hat clones floating around, why aren't there any known clones of SUSE? Don't they provide the same access to source code? Or some other reason?

By Parminder Ramesh at Sat, 2007/10/06 - 5:00am

In my country, a popular [1] distribution used by some enterprises, schools and government offices was based on Suse as a few years ago. Actually, I believe they keep using a lot of Suse packages to save work and they make a point to say the kernel is from them to market it as Suse compatible.

[1] its actually pretty unpopular among geeks because of its closed nature and shady government backing.


to find out the number of people who downloaded the whole DVD, vs. the number of those who downloaded a gnome only or KDE only CD. I don't think we'll see a surprise here, but hopefully will mean _something_ to novel. Hint Hint!

By Zak at Sat, 2007/10/06 - 5:00am

The project will publish more statistics than in the past, the two-day trend seems to be that the single install CDs slightly decrease the "have both desktops installed" fraction - for the benefit of KDE.

By binner at Sun, 2007/10/07 - 5:00am

I'm not entirely sure if I'm just paranoid or what, but at least 10.2:s KDE is steadily slipping in quality. There were times (8.0->10.0) when Kontact practically never crashed and Evolution never worked - now, however, it seems that times are changing. I get Kontact crashes 3-5 times a day whereas Evolution might actually work for a day (a small miracle in itself). Kudos for Kontact not loosing anything on crash though :)

By jmk at Sun, 2007/10/07 - 5:00am

been running 10.3 since Beta 1 and haven't had it crash once...

By odysseus at Sun, 2007/10/07 - 5:00am

Evolution has got to be the best email program around. Never managed to get it to crash! And I'm running KDE!! if you like crashes you can always turn to MS....

By jupieter at Tue, 2007/10/09 - 5:00am

My Kontact hasn't crashed in over a year, you really should debug that issue instead of just living with it. There are places to file bug reports, you know :-)

By apokryphos at Mon, 2007/10/08 - 5:00am

Kontact has never crashed for me on Opensuse. Then again, I never use many of the features in Kontact, like the Calender and Feeds...so it may have something to do with those.

It is true and funny about Evolution though. Aside from the crashes, that thing is a tad bit slow. Nice UI though.

By Henry S. at Mon, 2007/10/08 - 5:00am

I use kontact on a daily basis since SuSE 9.3. The groupware behind it is an Openexchange 5 server. I update KDE rather frequently.

I think that in general the kontact quality has improved with time. In my opinion it is possible to use it in a productive and professional environment today. In our environment there are whole weeks without any crash of kontact.

Crashes still occur from time to time. In my case these crashes are most often related to the /lib64/libthread_db_xxx.so libraries (and the KDE developers know that). The crash frequency seems to rise when TLS encryption is used to communicate with our Cyrus IMAP server. Other regions where crashes sometimes occur are the calendar and task management and resulting synchronization processes with the OX 5 server.

Furthermore I got the impression that the stability varies from KDE subrelease to subrelease, i.e. some versions under KDE 3.5.6 appeared to be more stable than some subversions of 3.5.7. So sometimes it pays to make an upgrade sometimes not. I regard this as normal - give the developers a chance!

So my recommendation is: Try a recent subversion of KDE 3.5.7 (the 3.5.7-64.1 rpms from SUSE were quite OK) but test the stability of all production relevant components (as kontact) thoroughly before you perform the upgrades in a productive environment.
And - if possible under your local security aspects - think about it twice!) - deactivate TLS or SSL when connecting to your imap or groupware server in an internal network.

By moenchmeyer at Mon, 2007/10/08 - 5:00am

I'd suggest using a checkout of the kdepim-enterprise branch rather than the regular kdepim 3.5 branch if you're going to check out something from SVN anyway. At least if you care about IMAP in KMail in any way. POP3 works fine in 3.5.7, but IMAP is badly broken and at least one of the issues (filtering completely messed up) is still open (so I don't think it's fixed in 3.5.8 SVN), the enterprise branch doesn't have the issue.



Has anybody used Amarok in 64 bits version? It tells me every time that it has no MP3 support, even when the fluendo lib is in /usr/lib64/gstreamer-0.10 and it crash when I exit the application or when I try to play an OGG song...

Using in-board sound card with an Asus motherboard.

By Klander at Tue, 2007/10/09 - 5:00am

I run it. I just use xine as engine. take a look at the opensuse wiki, in the section multimedia, they have a "one click installer" for all codecs.

By Mariano Guezuraga at Thu, 2007/10/11 - 5:00am

I seriously respect you guys for what you stand for and what you are doing for the linux community! Brilliant release! Thank you for all the work and effort you have put into producing this fine distro.


By itchy8me at Mon, 2007/10/15 - 5:00am