Well, the hits just keep on coming with the Beta 3 release of OpenSUSE's SUSE Linux 10.0. As with Mandriva's 2006 Beta 3, most of the changes are under the hood. The Changelog is quite extensive and it looks like the OpenSUSE developers have been very very busy.

Upon first login one finds that the nasty "beagle autostarting" bug is now fixed. That's every nice. So much so that I actually had a chance to test drive it. I started it from the menu and had it index my /home folder. From there I searched for "desktop." It found several files and displayed them in a nice browser. Double clicking it opens it in another application. In my case it was kfmclient. Really nice tool with a great look interface afterall.

        

One nice new addition I noticed was this really great menu search tool. At the top of the catagory headings is this box for inputing a term for searching in the menu. Then all the other items fade out except the term for which you were looking - making for easy location and selection. This is a wonderful addition, especially for SUSE Linux due to the fact their menus are chocked so full of applications.

        

That little X lock up glitch from beta 2 is now gone. The developers did quite a bit of work to xorg, but I didn't see anything in the changelog that would apply to my system. Most of their work was on the x86-64 arch, but something fixed it for me.

However not all was perfect. Even though the beagle autostart glitch was cleared up, gnome now insists upon starting up a file manager for each filesystem it finds. I closed them, logged out and logged back in to find, yep, it does it everytime. I even closed them all and click 'saved setup for next login' and retried. I had 15 little filemanager windows open each time.

    

Sound is now enabled at log in and the kde welcome wav greeted me this time. They have given OpenOffice.org a new splash image that looks really nice. Also included are many nice backgrounds for the desktop as well. Some are of a nature motiff featuring animals, fauna or landscapes. Others are SUSE specific. I had the installer install the nvidia drivers and Microsoft fonts during the "check for online updates" this time and that was wonderful. I didn't have to fiddle with anything at all to obtain 3d acceleration. That's a really nice feature. Have I mentioned what a nice kdm background and kde login splash screen is included?

        

Their efforts are evident and obvious as SUSE Linux begins to shape up and really show the polish. The system is fast and quite stable, not only that, it's slick and smooth (other than that gnome thing). I predict unprecedented number of downloads once 10.0 goes gold and SUSE fans will not be disappointed.

Changelog Highlights include:

• beagle:
  • Disable autostart in KDE and other autostart fixes

  • Remove upstreamed patches
• hwinfo:
  • fix pppoe detection

  • fix pcmcia probing and controller detection
  • getsysinfo collects a bit more info
  • load lp module
• gdm:
  • Remove upstreamed autologin patch

  • Now installs .desktop files in correct location
  • Make the default session option work on autologin
• kernel-update-tool:
  • Initial release.
• sysvinit:
  • Enable patch for killproc

  • Avoid zombie processes using startpar
  • Add the possibility of using pid numbers instead of a pid file
• sysconfig:
  • removed logging into a file in /tmp

  • use mktemp for temporary files
  • move static lib and la file to /usr
  • Also change default of USE_SYSLOG to "no"
  • make 'status' work in rcnetwork
  • wireless: added support for WEP keys up to 232 bit when entered as ASCII
• udev:
  • Removed all occurences of /etc/hotplug/functions from udev scripts

  • Moved isdn.sh and firmware.hotplug.sh to /sbin/udev.*.sh
    
  • Added README.Logging and a helper script to docdir
• yast2:
  • added check for `cancel to ncurses menu loop

  • added simple XEN detection & select kernel-xen if XEN is detected
• MozillaFirefox:
  • added backports (firefox-backports.patch)
    
  • fixed Gdk-WARNING at startup
    
  • workaround for linking with pangoxft and pangox

  • remove extensions on deinstallation
  • include dragonegg (kparts) plugin
  • fixed installation of the beagle plugin
    
  • included lockdownV2
• kernel-default:
  • update to 2.6.13-rc6-git13-4
    
  • network, ide, nfs, md fixes

  • lots of alsa and xen updates
  • lots of bugfixes
• Lots of kde, hal and xorg bug fixes, patches and updates
• Numerous version updates

More Sceenshots HERE.

The full rpm list is here.

That Pre-Release Software License Agreement is here.

The trimmed Changelog is here.

Please see my report on Beta 2 and it's Screenshots for some history, while my Beta 1 review and it's Screenshots give a good introduction.