The openSUSE Project is happy to announce the second milestone release for openSUSE 11.2 is ready for download. This release includes Firefox 3.5 beta 4, KDE 4.3 beta 1, GNOME 2.26, and hundreds of other updates from Milestone 1.

This is a Milestone Release, which means that it may not be suitable for production systems. This is one in a series of releases leading to the official openSUSE 11.2 release, scheduled for November 2009.

Screenshots of the 11.2 Milestone 2 release are available on the wiki.

A lot has changed since the 11.1 M1 release, with many packages being updated for 11.2. Some of the major changes in this release include:

• The distribution is built with GCC 4.4
• M2 uses the 2.6.30rc6 kernel
• Live CDs include The GIMP
• Default filesystem is Ext4
• Firefox 3.5 beta 4
• GNOME 2.26 packages and some preview packages from GNOME 2.27.1
• KDE 4.3 beta 1
• OpenOffice.org 3.1
• VirtualBox 2.2.2

See the openSUSE Wiki for additional changes in 11.2 Milestone 2. You can see the latest packages in Factory on DistroWatch, which tracks 203 major packages.

The latest development versions are available from http://software.opensuse.org/developer/. Choose from x86 or x86-64 install DVDs or the KDE and GNOME Live CDs.

Help us make openSUSE 11.2 the best release yet! Please run the release through your usual routine, and let us know about any bugs or other issues that you find. Remember that this is a milestone release, and is not suitable for use on production systems.

Though many openSUSE users can and do use the Factory distribution and/or testing releases for day-to-day work we want to stress that it’s entirely possible that you will encounter serious bugs. See openSUSE.org/Testing for more information on Testing. To follow the testing and development process, we suggest that you subscribe to the openSUSE-Factory mailing list, and join the #openSUSE-Factory channel on Freenode to discuss openSUSE development.