The openSUSE community has announced that the 6th Milestone of the upcoming release will be renamed openSUSE 12.1 Beta 1

As can be found in the detailed release schedule for 12.1 openSUSE has a 8 month development schedule. Starting about 2 months after the first release, 6 monthly milestones followed by two Release Candidates are published for testing. From the 6th milestone onwards only major/critical/blocker bug fixes are allowed and localization testing commences. Most other projects refer to this stage as ‘beta testing’ and the release team of openSUSE has decided to follow this naming from now on.

Release team coordinator Stephan “Coolo” Kulow notes: “the 6th milestone has sometimes gotten less testing than it deserved. We want to ensure the quality and stability of openSUSE and give users the best experience as possible. We need help from the wider community to find and fix the bugs in this release and this beta is the perfect opportunity to help out!”

The latest openSUSE testing release can always be found on the openSUSE download page and this timeline page provides some info on how to get involved.

  openSUSE 12.1 Beta 1 coming September 22th