Second RC for openSUSE 12.3 brings bigger-than-CD live images

The openSUSE development team is in the last stages of development of openSUSE 12.3, which they plan to make publicly available on 13 March. With the second release candidate, the developers have now shipped the last release before freezing the code base and synchronising the project's mirrors at the end of this week. This version of openSUSE is the first to enable users to install and boot the distribution on UEFI firmware with Secure Boot functionality enabled.

For openSUSE 12.3 RC2, the boot process on Secure-Boot-enabled systems includes a step where users will have to manually enable Secure Boot support in YaST. The developers are working to remove this additional step for the final release. The developers have also changed the size of the live media: it now exceeds the 800MB CD size limit, meaning that it will have to be booted from USB sticks instead of CDs. This allows openSUSE 12.3 RC2 to ship with a larger number of tools in the live images, including the GIMP, the entirety of LibreOffice 3.6 and the full OpenJDK environment. As part of the changes, Rhythmbox has replaced Banshee as the default audio player in the GNOME based live images.

Updated software in the second release candidate includes a Linux kernel based on the 3.7.9 upstream release, Firefox 19, Thunderbird 17.0.3 and OpenSSL 1.0.1e. DigiKam and Pulseaudio have also been updated to their 3.0 releases. An install image of openSUSE 12.3 RC2 as well as live images with different desktop environments are available for download from the openSUSE developer web site.

(fab)