Our Basilisk Lizard has shown this week its other side and I'd like to thank especially Jürgen, Lars, Christoph, Steffen, Jiri, Ladislav for taming the lizard. Fights come with a prize to pay - ours are two-fold: The PowerPC distribution and the CD installation.

We only have DVDs for i386 and x86-64 this time. They are available via ftp.opensuse.org and its mirrors. Mini-ISOs for remote installation are available as well. So, there are neither CDs nor deltas.

If you download the DVDs, check the media sizes first, they are:

openSUSE-10.2-Alpha5-DVD-i386.iso: 4165675008 bytes
openSUSE-10.2-Alpha5-DVD-x86_64.iso: 4203270144 bytes

Since most webservers are not setup to deliver files greater than 2 GB via http and our download.opensuse.org handles http download mainly, please use ftp to download from one of the known mirrors (see e.g. http://en.opensuse.org/Factory_Mirror_List).

The URL for the DVDs torrents are:
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/openSUSE-10.2-Alpha5/openSUSE-10.2-Alpha5-DVD-i386.torrent
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/openSUSE-10.2-Alpha5/openSUSE-10.2-Alpha5-DVD-x86_64.torrent

The list of known annoying bugs is available as usual at
http://en.opensuse.org/Bugs:Most_Annoying_Bugs#openSUSE_10.2_Alpha_5:

It currently contains:
* Registration fails Bug #205392
* After logging in to KDE, a popup window will inform you that dbus is not running. Just ignore the message - dbus is running Bug #209009
* Suspend to disk will fail with an error message "The resume device configured in /etc/suspend.conf". (fixed powersave package should be in factory by monday, until then you can edit /etc/suspend.conf and put your resume device from the resume=... boot parameter there. However, the fixed package is better).
* The x86-64 uses nearly double the disk space for installed packages than usual. It looks like a bug in binutils stripping the binaries Bug #210331
* Instead of /dev/hd for IDE disks using Intel ICHx chipsets the libata interfaces are used and disks show up as /dev/sd Bug #210478
* zen-updater always shows patterns to update Bug #198379
* It's not possible to start applications via kdesu, eg yast2. Workaround: use "su" in a shell. Bug #208272
* The bootloader configuration on BIOS-based RAID (so-called FakeRAID)
systems fails. BUG #208076
* gnome-screensaver does not accept the correct password. Bug #204364
* Workaround: Kill the gnome-screensaver process.

This is the last external Alpha, we will deliver in three weeks our
first Beta of openSUSE 10.2.

Alpha5 includes the following important changes:
* Linux kernel 2.6.18
* glibc 2.5
* Python 2.5
* Installation allows comfortable LVM partitioning
* Setup RAID automatically via the BIOS (so called fake-RAID support) in the partitioner
* GNOME 2.16.1 (most packages are updated)
* KDE 3.5.5 SVN version
* Firmware test as additional bootoption (this is the Intel firmware test tool)

Have a lot of fun with openSUSE 10.2 - codename "Basilisk Lizard",

Andreas