openSUSE Milestone 4

openSUSE Milestone 4, and final Milestone before starting the Beta process, is out for everyone to test. The process has worked out normally and although this Milestone came a few hours after it was planned, the process remains steady.Â openSUSE 13.1 is expected to be released in November of 2013 just in time for our second annual openSUSE Summit. The summit will provide an excellent opportunity for you to meet the people who took your contributions and made them part of the final openSUSE product. There will be plenty to talk about and it is also a good opportunity for you to present on what your worked on for 13.1. Do not miss the fun!

openSUSE 13.1 M4

This January a team of develpers started moving YaST codebase to Ruby. YaST utilized an old proprietary code that made it harder for developers interested in improving YaST to submit changes to it. With the Ruby translation, it makes it easier for anyone acquainted with YaST to contribute code to it. YaST is one of the software pillars for openSUSE. It is one of the oldest and most versatile system configuration tools out there and it is exclusive to openSUSE and SUSE. Is you want to find out more about YaST, go here. As you follow the link, you will notice that there is a good community involved into improving YaST. You can participate too if now Ruby makes it all easier for you to contribute. This milestone is the first to integrate the Ruby version of YaST, so when you test, give installation and configuration a good workout!

Other changes

Aside from the freshened-up version of YaST, there’s the list of major changes:

update-ca-certificates now uses p11-kit as backend. With p11-kit it’s now possible to have firefox and thunderbird use the system ca certificates instead of their own ones. You need to replace mozilla-nss-certs with p11-kit-nss-trust to make use of that feature.

motif is readded – we have openmotif 2.4 under LGPL now
we have yast2 3.0 (which would be yast3 then :) converted to Ruby now

KDE Workspaces, libs and apps 4.11 RC2

GNOME desktop 3.9.4

GTK3 3.9.8

GeoIP 1.5.1

hyper-v 4->5

qemu 1.6.0rc1

libreoffice 4.1.0.4

mc 4.8.9

ModemManager 1.0.0

scons 2.3.0

wine 1.6

xscreensaver 5.20->5.22 (yes, 2 screensavers for the price of one)

And furthermore there were minor updates to the kernel (we’re waiting for the next major release), RPM, systemd, GStreamer, Apache2, mariadb, poppler, and more.

Go, test!

openSUSE only features one beta version for testing (see the roadmap). Toolchain and Base system have already been frozen for bugfixes-only. Little by little and faster than you think, openSUSE will be ready to deliver the goods for those looking to test the most polished and stable Linux distribution to date. Â The beta features will enter our freeze time and only major critical bug fixes will be allowed and the same freeze will be applied to translations. This means that now is the time for you to make your contributions. Hurry, because the beta process will not allow new features to be included.

We’re a community!

As part of a global community effort, our distribution depends on the generous work of contributors who donate their time to code cool projects and include these into the distribution. It is important to note that for openSUSE there are essentially no requirements on the part of the contributors. openSUSE is one of the most welcoming distribution when it comes to contributions. This provides a strong basis and incentive for those looking to be part of our distribution effort. There are countless ways that as an individual you can contribute to the project. Allow us to show you just a few ideas.

Organize a “hackathon” meeting in your local community. Provide refreshments and a good environment in which you and your friends can get together to work on bugs, features and changes to the distribution. Once this process is done and you are ready to submit your changes, or the changes that your friends helped you create, follow the guidelines for this article in order to have our team review your changes and include them. Please note that the article referenced before is geared towards openSUSE 12.1. However, this process remains the same for all our releases, therefore you can be sure that the information about submitting your changes is accurate and valuable.

Even if you cannot program but would like to contribute in any way possible to make openSUSE great, you can participate too. There are still many opportunities that can involve you and make you part of a global Linux community. Our “How to Contribute” page has a few ideas that can guide into taking your first steps into participating with us. Surely, the more Linux enthusiasts willing to participate, the better and openSUSE welcomes them.

** Being sarcastic on **
I would like to hear though is there anyone out there that actually managed to install it? :-)
** Being sarcastic off **

I installed it just fine on my virtualbox, but it wont install on my laptop. I only get the windows entry in the grub menu
Changing from grub2 to grub displays a fine menu, but the installed does not allow grub :-( only grub2 all other options fails. (Then why display it?)

So – if you have run into this problem, and found a solution please let me know!

Fully agree to what you’ve mentioned (“… They are both slow crap …”). Almost all of the DTLs are slow, sometimes extremely slow. I never understood why someone would try to develop a decent application by using any of these toys. Seems to be a bit short sighted to get the job done quickly and then running into the obvious performance problems.

Because this is 2013 and even entry little hardware is “fast enough” for almost every task. In most applications as well speed simply doesn’t matter. As opposed to being “toys”, languages like python and ruby are next-generation languages, operating on a higher level as C++ is to assembler (you don’t advocate doing everything in assembler, do you?). Python runs Reddit, the Eve Online MMORPG, Dropbox, used extensively throughout Lucasfilm and other CGI companies, at least at one time for all of YouTube, planned NASA space shuttle missions, helped hunt for the Higgs Boson, powers Calibre e-book manager and Mercurial DVCS, etc.

As a programmer at the New York Stock Exchange put it:

>On the New York Stock Exchange we use three languages in production to deliver serious
>trading services to the Specialists: c, C++, Python.
>
>Perl, tcl/tk, Java are used but for scripting, tools, and minor services where performance
>and memory foot print are not an issue. Yes, used correctly Python meets our performance,
>security and reliability requirements.
>
>We have had Java projects and launched Java services, they have all failed. We have many in
>the pipeline (thanks Big Blue) but NYSE’s only serious internet based service is written in
>Python, and was launched in 1998. It is still up in it’s sixth version, with no down time!
>The fifth version was rewritten in Java, 6 months overdue, failed, and replaced by python ( >which took two weeks).
>
>Here at SIAC and NYSE Python is recognized by management to give results that other >languages just can’t achieve.
>
>For performance we have extended Python with our own specialized c objects, and we have
>used swig extensively to integrate to our legacy code, and middleware.
>
>Thanks Python, you let me get home to my kids.

Pretty interesting comments from the guy at NYX, thanks. I am occasionally using Python and it is on average 40 times slower than my C programs. (Sometimes getting close to C, but sometimes crossing the 100x slower mark.) So even in 2013 on new hardware I can occasionally be bothered by dynamically typed languages – no matter how “modern” they might be.

@Joseph: Interesting infos. Since I arrived @Python from a C programming background, I can say, that my C programs where about 2-3 timer faster at the expense of taking 20-30 times more time to get ready (I count setup [autotools] and debug time in!). That was 15 years ago. Nowadays, I use so many Python extensions, that would take ages to catch up with C(++). Highlights: PyQt, Pyramid and SQLAlchemy.

From my POV, the YaST decision for Ruby is a real pity, but more important is the way of project steering: having unit and coverage tests for the whole project would be the real McCoy. Don’t know, how strong Ruby is in this respect. Hoping all the best..

I am hoping a Suggestion left here will be seen by Project Managers who can take it under consideration.

I have a functionality upgrade request. Please add some form of time restriction module to the Yast Users app. Something similar to the KDE App KChildLock.

This topic is becoming more important to Parents who need all the assistance they can get from the tech industry. Furthermore functionality such as this would be very useful in a school or pre-school which currently has limited access to solutions except to develop something in-house. Currently Mac is the only purchasable OS which has this functionality built in. An Ubuntu has a app similar to KChildLock added.

BTW: Been using Suse since 6.4. I still love it an look forward to running the final release of 13.1 in Nov.

I would say Keep up the Great work, but that goes with out saying. As you will. Thats why you are in the position your in with the product you have. An thats why I will continue to support an make use of OpenSuse an SLES (Suse Linux Enterprise Server)

While my opensuse 12.3 is a very solid built of the opensuse distro i’ve used since 10.0, virtualbox, vmware player, vsftp, pureftp, proftp all are very buggy and don’t work with my current distro. Am hopping that this will be sorted out.

Been playing with various distros of Linux over the years and sadly had to stay with Windows b/c I use my computers for work that has certain programs requiring Windows. Finally retired and have been toying with Linux more and finally realized of all the distros, I liked Ubunto the least and OpenSUSE the best. Downloaded and installed ver 12.3 after deciding to give it a serious go at replacing Windows totally. I finally have done it with only 1 program still at issue. I use IBM (Lotus Notes) and the Linux versions do not seem to mount on OpenSUSE, can not figure why not. However, the current version of Wine (1.5)allows installing versions 8.5.3 and 9.0 of the Windows version and all functions work so, good to go.

I have an install on an Acer Aspire One that uses the Atom 270 chip and it is faster than XP and hangs up less. Still trying some programs such as Calligra in lieu of the defaults included in the distro and getting multimedia working. I have encountered some issues such as when updating to KDE 4.11 that does not like to play nicely with any version of Calligra including the latest that specifically requires ver 4.11 according to the web info. Not an issue, just reverted back to the earlier vrsion of KDE THAT CAME WITH 12.3.

All in all, while there are still some things to deal with such as getting it to work with my BlackBerry Playbook I can say that Linux is finally at a development point where I no longer need or want to deal with Microsoft. Can not wait to try 13.1 when it is released though presently not sure if I see a reason or need to update. I do like the idea of the support cycle for 13.1, makes life easier. Getting too old to start wiping and redoing computers.

Having tested 13.1 MK IV in a virtual machine everything seems to work fairly well. I have real hope for a good desktop search this time. All previous versions (up and including 12.3) has been a disappointment (especially the UI for the result)

I noticed some performance degradation in YaST but not so much that it really affects the work. When doing some admin tasks via YaST waiting a couple of seconds extra is not a biggie. Especially if the rewrite to Ruby will make YaST evolve a bit more (and faster). No doubt there will be some more performance tuning.

I have big hopes of a faster development for YaST since there are still areas where YaST is more of a hindrance than a help and where manual configuration is a must (Web, Mail, FTP for example). I would actually argue to even remove some components since they give “false hopes” to a newbie.