Sneak preview of Suse Linux Enterprise 11

Novell is offering a sneak preview of the forthcoming Suse Linux Enterprise 11 server (SLES) and desktop (SLED) versions to download. SLE 11 contains current software, including kernel version 2.6.27, X.org 7.4, Gnome 2.24 and KDE 4.1, Apache 2.2.10 and Samba 3.2.5, PHP 5.2.6, and Python 2.6. For systems management, a new update stack has been included with a new command line tool – zypper, for managing repositories and packages. To enable use in heterogeneous environments the developers have implemented the Common Information Model (CIM) and WS-Management system management standards.

ReiserFS has been replaced by Ext3 as the default filesystem, but ReiserFS3, XFS and the OCFS2 cluster filesystems are supported. LVM2 has replaced EVMS2 for volume management, while the networking improvements mainly affect IPV6 support, 10-Gbit Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Data Center Bridging.

Like OpenSuse 11.1, the kernel contains the SELinux security extension as well as AppArmor. However, Novell does not support the use of SELinux, or ship a SELinux policy yet. TPM hardware by Infineon, NSC and Atmel and the virtual TPM device in Xen are supported with a tpm-tools package and trustedgrub bootloader is available.

Novell lists further features that are included in SLE 11, but not yet supported by it, under the heading "Technology Previews". Features in this catagory include hot-adding RAM on selected hardware, the new Ext4 filesystem, the eCryptfs encrypted filesystem and KVM, the virtualisation technology preferred by Red Hat.

SLE 11 will be available for the x86, x64, Itanium, PPC and System-z platforms. Depending on the platform, the Linux distribution supports between 32 (x86) and 4096 processors (Itanium) and 16GB (x86) to 4TB (Itanium) of RAM. Further details are to be found in the release notes.

(crve)