Two days ago, OpenSuse 10.3 was released to the public. The fibre lines must have been glowing red from the immense demand, and during the peek they were up at around 14 gigabits per second. The average speed was around 12 gigabit per second. The mirror servers aren’t included, this was only the downloads from Novell.
Novell’s wiki had at the same time a load on 99 percent but still continued allowing requests from outside. To cope with the heavy load they put in another server with load balancing.
The server had over 1000 requests per second and when the new server was put into the network the load decreased to 30 percent.
As said openSUSE is available for downlaod at Novell’s file servers. The distribution offers a lot of new things, and it seems that software management have been one of the top priorities.
In openSUSE 10.3, the package manager is redone from scratch to give the developers and users a new and comfortable environment. Better support for dependencies, a uniform infrastructure to download both programs and patches. One of the big news is that you now also can use the graphical update tools to upgrade. If there is a new version of your favourite program and there is a package for it, you now can update it. Something that was missing before and was one of the reason why I chose another distribution.
Another new thing is the so called 1-click install, which will make it a lot easier to install new software that isn’t available in openSUSE’s own file archive. The model is very good when the user wants to install proprietary drivers or codecs to be able to watch DVD, and which the distribution does not offer based on judicial reasons.
To download and install these types of softwares, the user must first add a new file archive, update the archive, search and then install the program. An operation that may not be that easy for the beginner user. That’s the reason why 1-click was developed, it handles all this is the background.
The user can via a web page or CD/DVD click on the program he or she wants to install, a XML-file is downloaded that tells which file archive that is needed to be added and what the file is called. The update program then handles all this in the background, the user experiences as if the program is downloaded and installed automatically.
OpenSUSE 10.3 is also loaded with the latest version of Gnome (2.20) and KDE. If you are curious on how KDE 4 will look like, the installation disc also contains a preview on how the next generation desktop will look like.
The Distribution also comes with OpenOffice.org 2.3 with Novell’s own fixes, one of which is improved macro support in OpenOffice.org Calc.
You’ll also find tools for virtualization. Both the latest Xen 3.1 and the desktop program VirtualBox 1.4 is found on the disc.
Something new for this distribution is the support for MP3 that is working right from the start. This is nice, one thing less to bother with after the installation.
You can download openSUSE on http://www.opensuse.org. You can choose to download the files through torrents, if you find the servers overloaded.
I just downloaded it, have to say that it’s a lot different from the suse I tried out a while ago. I couldn’t get anything to work back then.
Gina
October 7th, 2007
Yeah, I had the same feeling for SUSE back then, but I just downloaded the latest openSUSE to try it out and see what they have to offer.
For working and development I am running Debian. Now that’s a good distribution
Krillz
October 7th, 2007
Nice, I like debian as well, but switched to ubuntu later on . Gonna try out opensuse as well then get back to ubuntu.
Gina
October 7th, 2007