OpenSUSE 10.3 alpha 7 has just arrived. For announcement, please see http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-anno ... 00001.html

It features KDE 4.0 beta 1, and an improved package management system. It's feature ready, but still needs some optimizations, so speed is a bit lacking, even on SMP machines. Hint: avoid detailed package selection during installation, as it's very slow.

It installs nicely on EFIKA, see previous posts for details. There is one change, which makes life a bit difficult: if an already existing swap partition is used during installation, then the installer does not put it into /etc/fstab, and there wont be a swap partition activated on first boot. Workaround: once doing the second stage of installation, switch to the second console (alt+f2) and turn on swap from the command line (swapon /dev/sda2 , if swap is on the second partition).

Tested 'factory' during the and today. The installer & package manager are in very bad shape now, I could not install it today even after trying it a couple of different ways :-(

I'll post here, if it's worth again trying. And it's worth, as openSUSE has a very nice package selection and a very good user experience both on Pegasos and EFIKA even in the development version, except for package management.

Tested 10.3 beta1 and the related factory release in the past few days, but they are not worth for a separate announcement :-(

Some of the major problems:

- initrd generation is broken, so one needs to boot each time using the installer

- adding repositories does not work, so installing Opera, pine, xv, and other non OSS software is now a kind of difficult

On the other hand, package management feels to be a bit faster with reduced RAM requirements (but still needing a lot of swap space). So the problems are mainly related to installation and not to everyday usage. Most applications are bleeding edge, but still well integrated with the rest of the distribution providing the usual polished user experience from the SUSE team.