eDelayed by a week due to a critical bug that prevented testing, the openSUSE project today announces openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 3 (M3), the third of six milestone releases of what will become openSUSE 11.4. The bug, a crash in the software rasterizer of the Mesa OpenGL stack, was found by our automated test suite and the openSUSE XOrg developers swung into action so that KDE would work on systems without hardware acceleration, which includes most virtual machines.

systemd, the alternative init system, becomes available for testing in M3 with version 11. To test systemd, install it, then reboot with init=/bin/systemd as described by Andreas Jaeger. Otherwise, the existing SysV init is used.

M3 includes Gnome 2.32 on the desktop, including metacontact support in the Empathy instant messenger and Banshee 1.8 with Amazon MP3 store plugin, KDE 4.5.3, and a number of independent updates including version 0.11 of the Arora browser, the chemistry tool Avogadro 1.0.1 and Licq 1.5, introducing XMPP support to this venerable IM client.

On the productivity front, M3 includes LibreOffice 3.2.99, a host of additional optional packages for KOffice such as lcms2 giving better colour management and image processing options, and Digikam 1.5.0 including automated lens correction while batch processing multiple images,

Mono 2.8 replaces Mono 2.6 and adds C# 4.0, an new garbage collector and many performance improvements.

At the lower level, Linux kernel 2.6.36 is in, along with smartmontools 5.40 brings SSD support, and Wireshark 1.4 brings many performance improvements and memory footprint reductions.

Due to a new liblzma, delta ISOs from M2 to M3 must be applied using a new version of deltarpm. Stephan Kulow provides this in his home:coolo Build Service project.

We look forward to your bug reports and test experiences. Automated testing and the openSUSE Factory team have been active to ensure that your download of M3 will be at least minimally functional.

The next milestone is scheduled for November 25. openSUSE 11.4 is planned to be released in March 2011.