The openSUSE Project Turns Two with Improved Build Service and 10.3 Beta

On the second anniversary of the creation of the openSUSE™ project, the community program this week marked two new milestones – the availability of the first beta of openSUSE 10.3 and the continued growth of the openSUSE Build Service.

"We appreciate all the contributions the community has made to the openSUSE project during the past two years," said Michael Loeffler, openSUSE product manager at Novell. "The goal of the openSUSE project is to promote the use of Linux everywhere, and our strong community of developers, testers, writers, translators, artists and users have been instrumental in creating one of the world's best Linux distributions. And as we seek to streamline and improve collaboration between all Linux developers, the openSUSE Build Service has changed the way packages have been built. The build service is quickly becoming a center for building any Linux distribution."

OpenSUSE Build Service Momentum

Now with more than 700 projects and 20,000 software packages, the openSUSE Build Service is an innovative framework that provides an infrastructure for software developers to easily create and compile packages for multiple Linux* distributions. The development team today released the first version of the end-user interface for the build service, with which users of any openSUSE, SUSE® Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu or Mandriva distribution can easily search and browse new software for their distribution. Users of the upcoming openSUSE 10.3 can install their software with one click directly from the Web interface. In the past four months, more than 13 million packages have been downloaded from the openSUSE Build Service as developers build packages for various distributions using the tool.

AMD has helped sponsor the progress of the openSUSE Build Service with leading-edge hardware and development expertise. "AMD is helping to ensure that the openSUSE Build Service continues to be an important collaboration and development platform for developers of all distributions," said Terri Hall, AMD vice president of Commercial Systems Marketing. "AMD recognizes the value of the open source development model, and by providing hardware for the openSUSE Build Service, we are able to actively participate in the continued innovation for which the open source community is known."

Developers who want to provide their software to a broader audience of Linux users are often hampered when packages built for one distribution will not work on other distributions. The openSUSE Build Service is the only open source build system that helps developers provide packages with the same high quality for multiple distributions from the same source code. With the system imaging tool KIWI, open source developers can more quickly build a Linux distribution that meets their needs, rigorously test it to ensure product quality, and easily package it for quick installation.

The openSUSE Build Service is completely open source, giving developers and users free and full access to build their choice of Linux packages, whether based on openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu or other projects. An essential part of the openSUSE project, the openSUSE Build Service is available at www.opensuse.org/Build_Service. The new end-user interface can be found at software.opensuse.org.

First Beta of openSUSE 10.3

OpenSUSE 10.3 offers a state-of-the-art operating system based on Linux kernel 2.6.22 with a large variety of the latest open source applications for desktops, servers and application development. The first beta of openSUSE 10.3 is now available at www.opensuse.org.