First openSUSE 12.2 release candidate arrives

Following a month long delay, the first release candidate for version 12.2 of the openSUSE Linux distribution is now available for testing. Originally, RC1 was supposed to arrive on 14 June, with the final version following on 11 July. However, four weeks ago, release manager Stephan "Coolo" Kulow announced a two-month delay following a "wake up call" for the project.

Along with a number of bug fixes, openSUSE 12.2 RC1 includes version 2.00 of the GRUB bootloader and updates the Zypper package manager to version 1.7.3. Package upgrades include Plymouth 0.8.5.1, X Server 1.12.3 (which features multi-touch support), version 3.5.4.6 of the LibreOffice productivity suite and Chromium 22.0.1190. VirtualBox, Nmap, Pango, Go, phpMyAdmin, aria2, GnuTLs, MariaDB and jEdit also received minor updates. Licence data was corrected and dependencies were optimised; for example, Cronie, a Cron fork, no longer requires Postfix to be installed.

The distribution includes a choice of desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE SC 4.8.4. As the developers emphasise stability, openSUSE 12.2 will not feature the upcoming major 4.9 update to KDE, despite the delay to the distribution's final release and numerous requests. Small improvements were also made to Xfce in openSUSE, while LXDE's LXPanel has been updated to 0.5.1.

The first release candidate for openSUSE 12.2 is available to download as an installation DVD image or as a Live system with GNOME or KDE. At the time of writing, the most annoying bugs page only lists one known problem in the RC related to Intel chips causing GNOME Shell crashes; according to the bugzilla page for the problem, this has now been fixed.

(crve)