OpenSUSE

 

OpenUSE was founded on September 2, 1992 in Germany, under the name Gesellschaft für Software- und Systementwicklung mbH (S.u.S.E. GmbH), meaning: "Software and System Development, Inc.". The first GNU/Linux distribution (S.u.S.E. Linux 1.0) was released in 1994 - making SUSE one of the oldest existing GNU/Linux distributions. Originally it was merely a German version of an American distribution called Slackware, but later SUSE has become one of the leading distributions. In 2003 SUSE was acquired by Novell and today development is distributed all over the world, but mainly located in Nuremberg, Germany, Prague in the Czech Republic and in the U.S.

In 2005 the openSUSE project was started with the goal of opening up development and involve the community more. openSUSE provides the base for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop and Open Enterprise Server. In 2010 Novell was acquired by Attachmate. The deal was finalized in April 2011, and one of the first actions of Attachmate was to split SUSE into a separate business unit independant of Novell, and move SUSE headquarters back to Nuremberg, Germany.

They may not have realized it at the time, but these young men changed the face of Linux forever. When their first planned distribution lacked a good installation and configuration tool, YaST (Yet another Setup Tool) was developed. Popular for its easy use, attractive graphical interface and the capability to customize your systems quickly during and after the installation, YaST took the Linux enterprise community by storm. And this was just the beginning.

SUSE's technical expertise and customer focus always stood out from other Linux distributions. IBM took notice and increasingly cooperated with SUSE in development work for their high-end platforms. Built on top of the open source Linux kernel and distributed with system and application software from other open source projects, SUSE was one of the first to deliver the value of open source to the enterprise.

In 2004 Novell bought SUSE and expanded community contributions further by sponsoring the openSUSE project and openSUSE Build Service. They made major contributions to the Linux kernel as well as Xen, KVM, OpenOffice.org, GNOME and KDE. Currently operating as an independent business unit of The Attachmate Group, SUSE continues to innovate and serve the business needs of its partners and customers worldwide with the best Linux distribution on the market.

Version history

The openSUSE project aims to release a new version every eight months. Since version 11.2, critical updates have been provided for two releases plus two months, which results in a support lifetime of 18 months. To add predictability and to prevent people from thinking the .0 releases are more major, the openSUSE version scheme has changed starting in openSUSE 12.1. All November releases have a .1, all July releases have a .2, and all March releases have a .3. Every two years, when another .1 version is released, the major

10.x Series

The initial stable release from the openSUSE Project was SUSE Linux 10.0, released on October 6, 2005. This was released as a freely downloadable ISO image and as a boxed retail package, with certain bundled software only included in the retail package.

On May 11, 2006, the openSUSE Project released SUSE Linux 10.1, with the mailing list announcement identifying Xgl, NetworkManager, AppArmor and Xen as prominent features.

For their third release, the openSUSE Project renamed their distribution, releasing openSUSE 10.2 on December 7, 2006. Several areas that developers focused their efforts on were reworking the menus used to launch programs in KDE and GNOME, moving to ext3 as the default file system, providing support for internal readers of Secure Digital cards commonly used in digital cameras, improving power management framework (more computers can enter suspended states instead of shutting down and starting up) and the package management system. This release also featured version 2.0 of Mozilla Firefox.

The fourth release, openSUSE 10.3, was made available as a stable version on October 4, 2007^. An overhaul of the software package management system (including support for 1-Click-Install), legal MP3 support from Fluendo and improved boot-time are some of the areas focused on for this release.

11.x Series

openSUSE 11.0 was released on June 19, 2008. It includes the latest version of GNOME and two versions of KDE (the older, stable 3.5.9 and the newer 4.0.4). It comes in three freely downloadable versions: a complete installation DVD (including GNOME, KDE3, and KDE4), and two Live CDs (GNOME, and KDE4 respectively). A KDE3 Live CD was not produced due to limited resources. Package management and installation were made significantly faster with ZYpp.

openSUSE 11.1 was released on December 18, 2008. Updated software includes GNOME 2.24.1, KDE 4.1.3 + KDE 3.5.10, OpenOffice.org 3.0, VirtualBox 2.0.6, Compiz 0.7.8, Zypper 1.0.1, continued improvement in the software update stack, X.Org 7.4, Xserver 1.5.2 and Linux kernel 2.6.27.7.

openSUSE 11.2 was released on November 12, 2009. It includes KDE 4.3, GNOME 2.28, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, OpenOffice.org 3.1, improved social network support, updated filesystems such as Ext4 as the new default and support for Btrfs, installer support for whole-disk encryption, significant improvements to YaST and zypper, and all ISO images are hybrid and now support both USB and CD-ROM boot.

openSUSE 11.3 was released on July 15, 2010. It includes KDE 4.4.4, GNOME 2.30.1, Mozilla Firefox 3.6.6, OpenOffice.org 3.2.1, SpiderOak support, support for the Btrfs filesytem and support for LXDE. It also updates the Linux kernel to version 2.6.34.

openSUSE 11.4 was finished on March 3, 2011 and released on March 10, 2011. It includes KDE 4.6.0, GNOME 2.32.1, Mozilla Firefox 4.0 beta 12, and switched from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice 3.3.1. It updates the Linux kernel to version 2.6.37.

12.x Series

openSUSE 12.1 was released on November 16, 2011. This includes KDE 4.7 and GNOME 3.2 and Firefox 7.0.1. The Linux kernel was updated to 3.1.0 It also introduced an advanced disk snapshot tool, called Snapper, for managing Btrfs snapshots. openSUSE 12.1 was also the first release of openSUSE to use systemd by rather than the traditional System V init. Users can still select to boot to System V init at startup time.

openSUSE 12.2 was to be released on July 11, 2012, but was postponed due to persistent stability issues. The final release candidate was eventually announced on August 2, 2012 and the final release date was September 6, 2012. 12.2 includes the desktop environments KDE 4.8, GNOME 3.4, and XFCE 4.10 and now uses Plymouth and GRUB 2 by default.

openSUSE 12.3 was released on schedule on March 13, 2013. This includes KDE 4.10, GNOME 3.6, Firefox 19.0, LibreOffice 3.6, and the removal of SuSEconfig. Also, the Live CD images were replaced with Live USB images and an XFCE rescue image.