openSUSE GNOME Live CD Changelog

What's new in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 13.2

Nov 4, 2014
  • Innovative:
  • Built around the most innovative technologies Linux has to offer: Snapper to take the most from snapshots capability of the powerful Btrfs filesystem offered as default option, Wicked to bring light to network configuration, Dracut to ensure shorter boot times… For users asking for even more innovation Plasma 5.1, the next generation workspace by KDE, is also available as a technical preview.
  • Polished:
  • This version presents the first step to adopt the new openSUSE design guidelines system-wide. The graphical revamp is noticeable everywhere: the installer, the bootloader, the boot sequence and all of the (seven!) supported desktops (KDE, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, Enlightenment 19, Mate and Awesome). Even the experimental Plasma 5.1 is adapted to the overall experience.
  • Easy:
  • The new openSUSE 13.2 installer comes with several changes targeted to make the installation process easier and more welcoming to new users. Those changes include a new and more straightforward installation work flow, better and smarter automatic proposals, less cluttered configuration options and a brand new layout for the user interface. In addition, several tools are included to easy the administration of any system like the Profile Management Tools for AppArmor or the YaST module for Snapper, just to name a few.
  • GNOME:
  • GNOME 3.14 includes greatly improved support for HiDPI screens and MultiTouch input devices, including gestures support. Network and geolocation capabilities has been also dramaticaly improved, as well as Wayland integration. All GNOME applications have received a lot of new features and improvement. In addition, this is the first release of openSUSE including GNOME Software, the ‘AppStore’ for the GNOME Desktop, nicely integrated with default openSUSE package management system.
  • Virtualization:
  • In addition to Linux Containers 1.0.6 and the full virtualization solutions traditionally provided by openSUSE (with QEMU 2.1 and VirtualBox 4.3.18), this release also includes Docker 1.2 which, together with the availability of openSUSE 13.2 images at Docker Hub, makes openSUSE a perfect base system to distribute applications.
  • Improved YaST:
  • Several parts of YaST have been improved and cleaned up after the automatic conversion from YCP language to Ruby shipped with 13.1. Compared to that version, the new YaST is faster, more stable and better integrated with systemd, Btrfs and the other cutting edge technologies included in openSUSE 13.2. The new installation work flow allows to run the whole configuration phase and skip the final step, getting a complete reusable AutoYaST profile instead of an installed system.
  • IDEs and tooling:
  • This release offers the latest version of the fully featured IDE KDevelop (4.7.0), the last of the versions based on the 4.x KDE development platform. In addition to C++, there are plugins available which extend its support for additional languages such as PHP or Python. In addition, most recent version of several other popular IDEs are shipped, like Anjuta 3.14 and two flavors of Qt Creator 3.2.1 (for Qt4 and Qt5).
  • Languages and Libraries:
  • KDE Frameworks 5, a series of development libraries on top of Qt 5 made by KDE, is present in its latest stable release (5.3.0). The libraries co-exist with the existing 4.x variants, allowing development of KF5-based applications within a stable 4.x based workspace. In the land of dynamic languages, Ruby packaging is now even easier. Need JRuby? Want Rubinius? No problem. We can do it. Not only Ruby has been updated (2.1.3), but also Python (2.7.8 and 3.4.1), PHP (5.6.1), Perl (5.20) and many others.

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 13.2 RC1 (Oct 9, 2014)

  • This release includes GNOME 3.14, which brings new animations, better handling of WiFi hotspots, improvements in some applications like Weather and Photos and much more. Another highlight is the brand new Firefox 32, with new HTTP cache for improved performance and public key pinning support. Updates to KDE (from version 4.14.0 to 4.14.1) and Plymouth (from 0.8.8 to 0.9.0) should also help to boost stability and to smooth the end user experience.

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 13.2 Milestone 0 (Mar 19, 2014)

  • The btrfs filesystem is default (and comes with btrfsprogs 3.12), as is the wicked network management tool and the dracut initrd replacement
  • YaST sports a new look and its Qt front-end is ported to Qt5
  • Zypper is at the 1.10.x branch for the next release, introducing a number of bug fixes and minor improvements
  • KDE Frameworks 5 packages are included, as well as the latest Application and Platform releases in the 4.x series
  • Our infrastructure is updated: rpm 4.11.2 introduces weak dependencies, PackageKit 0.8.16 comes with a new appdata format and there are binutils .24, Bluez 5.15, systemd 210, pulseaudio at 5.0 and the latest 3.14RC kernel
  • In the graphics area we now have packages for wayland 1.4, freetype 2.5.2 (changing font weights) and Mesa 10.1
  • Cloud and databases bring xen 4.4, virtualbox 4.3.8 and postgresql 9.3.
  • For developers we’ve included GCC 4.9 (default still 4.8.2), make 4.0, llvm 3.4, cmake 3.0(rc), gdb 7.7, git 1.9.0 and subversion 1.8.8
  • In the language area, we’ve now got ruby 2.1, php5 5.5.9 and python 2.7.6 and 3.4.0(rc)

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 13.1 (Nov 19, 2013)

  • Stabilized:
  • Much effort was put in testing openSUSE 13.1, with improvements to our automated openQA testing tool, a global bug fixing hackathon and more. The btrfs file system has received a serious workout and while not default, is considered stable for everyday usage. This release has been selected for Evergreen maintenance extending its life cycle to 3 years.
  • Networked:
  • This release introduces the latest OpenStack Havana with almost 400 new features. Web server admins will appreciate the latest Apache, MySQL and MariaDB updates. Web developers benefit from an updated Ruby 2.0 on Rails 4 with improvements from core classes to better caching in the Rails framework and the latest php 5.4.2 comes with a build-in testing server. End users can now mount Amazon s3 buckets as local file system and use much improved Samba 4.1 with better windows domains support.
  • Evolved:
  • openSUSE moves forward with AArch64, making openSUSE ready for development on the upcoming generation of 64bit ARM devices. 32bit ARM support has been heavily improved and a special Raspberry Pi build for openSUSE is available. This release also delivers GCC 4.8 with new error reporting abilities, the latest glibc supporting AArch64, C11 and Intel TSX Lock Elision, the new SDL2 and Qt 5.1, bringing QML and C++11 features to developers..
  • Polished:
  • openSUSE 13.1 comes with much improved font hinting thanks to the new font engine in Freetype 2.5. YaST has been ported to Ruby, opening contribution up to a large number of skilled developers. In this release, ActiveDoc replaces doc.opensuse.org and the majority of packaged documents in openSUSE, lowering the barrier to contribution.
  • Faster:
  • New is accelerated video with VDPAU support in MESA and an optimized version of glibc for 32bit systems. Linux 3.11 includes work on ‘page reclaim’, maintaining performance during disk operations.
  • Feature-full:
  • Desktop users will appreciate the Android devices integration in the KDE file manager, in the shell and in music player Amarok. Artists have to try out the new Krita improvements with textured painting, greyscale masks & selections and more. GNOME Shell introduces a redesign of the system status bar and Header Bars in many applications, making better use of screen space. Enlightenment now also has an openSUSE theme.
  • Innovative:
  • This release comes with a number of experimental technologies to try out. This includes preliminary Wayland support with Weston compositor in GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma Desktop as well as improved support for Ultra high-resolution in applications and shells. New is also the LightDM KDE greeter and a plasma NetworkManagement applet for testing.

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 13.1 RC2 (Oct 31, 2013)

  • systemd was updated to version 208
  • Shim should now work which means the secure boot is possible
  • Plasma-nm no longer replaces the knetworkmanager
  • Calibre is now fully operational
  • kernel was updated with more fixes and one speedy improvement everyone could read about on phoronix (the radeon/nouveau timer improvements)
  • In the area of virtualization the xen and libvirt packages were updated
  • A lot of migration issues were fixed so zypper dup from older release will go smoother
  • Apper should no longer choke on multiple license agreements
  • YaST parts were updated fixing bunch of installer bugs
  • XFCE can now properly suspend
  • e17 artwork was openSUSEfied (yay!)
  • Akonadi should better handle PostgreSQL as backend
  • Our vlc version was updated to 2.1 which is the latest and coolest provided
  • Translations updates

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 13.1 RC1 (Oct 11, 2013)

  • KDE-4.11.2
  • Gnome-3.10
  • Kernel-3.11.3 + load of btrfs fixes thanks to feedback from beta
  • snapper-0.1.7 (btrfs!)
  • nginx – finaly built properly
  • bluez5 – pulseaudio/gnome/kde integration to provide bluez5 is finally in place
  • plasma-nm – alternative gui for networkmanager in KDE was adjusted and now provides some sane usability
  • Tons of bugs fixed and closed
  • zypper dup from 12.3 should now not render the system unable to log in…

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 13.1 Beta 1 (Sep 19, 2013)

  • kernel 3.11.1
  • llvm/clang 3.3
  • Mesa 9.2.0
  • systemd 207
  • php5 5.4.19
  • tcl 8.6
  • bluez 5
  • wine 1.7
  • samba 4.1
  • KDE SC 4.11.1 and GNOME 3.9.91
  • apache2 2.4.6
  • texlive 2013
  • vim 7.4
  • Amarok 2.8

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 13.1 Milestone 2 (Jun 14, 2013)

  • livecds using overlayfs now with persistent hybrid support
  • automake 1.12.1->1.13.2
  • boost 1.49.0->1.53.0
  • util-linux 2.21.2->2.23.1
  • evolution 3.8.1->3.9.1
  • gtk3 3.8.1->3.9.0
  • icu 50.1.2->51.2
  • iproute2 3.7.0->3.9.0
  • kernel 3.9.0->3.10.rc4
  • libreoffice 4.0.2.2.1->4.0.3.3.2
  • MozillaFirefox 20.0->21.0
  • pulseaudio 3.0->4.0
  • qemu 1.4.0->1.5.0

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 13.1 Milestone 1 (May 17, 2013)

  • GNOME 3.6 > 3.8.1
  • apache2 2.2.22 > 2.4.3
  • digikam 3.0.0 > 3.1.0
  • giflib 4.1.6 > 5.0.3
  • icecream 0.9.7 > 1.0.0
  • kernel 3.7.10 > 3.9.0
  • libreoffice 3.6.3.2.4 > 4.0.2.2.1
  • ocaml 3.12.1 > 4.00.1
  • qemu 1.3.0 > 1.4.0
  • qt-creator 2.6.2 > 2.7.0
  • ruby 1.9.3 > 2.0
  • systemd 195 > 202
  • wpa_supplicant 1.1 > 2.0
  • xorg-x11-server 1.13.2 > 1.14.1

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 12.3 (Mar 13, 2013)

  • Finishing touches:
  • openSUSE 12.3 finishes the integration of systemd and delivers a better system log experience with journald. Reliable graphical package management tools and a new theme bring a consistent experience from boot to desktop. The 1GB live images are now optimized for USB sticks and the ARM team has stable openSUSE 12.3 ARM v7 and experimental ARM 64bit images ready for this exciting architecture.
  • Polishing up:
  • The latest desktops bring additional polish with much faster metadata handling, a new print manager and improved bluetooth integration in KDE’s Plasma Desktop and improved notifications, better file management and account integration for Exchange and Windows Live in GNOME Shell.
  • New Features:
  • 12.3 brings new technologies to users with the inclusion of PostgreSQL 9.2 which comes with native JSON support (noSQL style). We’ve moved over from MySQL to MariaDB as default. This is the first openSUSE release with a complete OpenStack “Folsom” for cloud fans and this release debuts the E17 desktop and the Sawfish and awesome window managers.
  • Moving forward:
  • openSUSE moves forward with the inclusion of updated applications. DigiKam 3.0 comes with much expanded abilities for batch processing of images and new and improved filters & plugins; the major PIM applications received updates with Evolution now having an automatically updated search folder and spell checking all over while Kontact’s quick filter searches the full mail bodies and has an improved composer. Development tools like KDevelop, monodevelop and valgrind got preliminairy Android support; Development libraries like GTK3 and KDE Development Platform are included with new releases. This release also brings proper UEFI support for x86_64 hardware and experimental support for Secure Boot enabled hardware.

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 12.3 RC2 (Feb 28, 2013)

  • amavisd-new 2.7.2->2.8.0
  • digikam 2.9.95->3.0.0
  • gnome-shell 3.6.2->3.6.3
  • gnutls 3.0.26->3.0.28
  • kernel-default 3.7.6->3.7.9
  • kiwi 5.04.37->5.04.53
  • libcdio 0.83.git->0.90
  • libdrm 2.4.41->2.4.42
  • mariadb 5.5.28a->5.5.29
  • MozillaFirefox 18.0.1->19.0
  • MozillaThunderbird 17.0.2->17.0.3
  • openssl 1.0.1c->1.0.1e
  • postfix 2.9.5->2.9.6
  • pulseaudio 2.1->3.0
  • release-notes-openSUSE 12.3.1->12.3.3
  • seamonkey 2.15.1->2.16
  • sysconfig 0.80.4->0.80.5
  • wine 1.5.22->1.5.23

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 12.3 Beta 1 (Jan 17, 2013)

  • Desktops and apps:
  • The Beta comes with 4.10 RC2 of KDE’s workspaces and applications. KDE has announced a third RC due to some late changes and this version is part of a testing sprint organized by the KDE Quality team. openSUSE KDE packagers have build a special live Image to test this release but we urge you to get the Beta packages from software.opensuse.org as they are of course newer.
  • File manager Thunar (well known to XFCE users as it is the default file manager there) introduces tab support, improved bookmark handling (including easily adding remote bookmarks), improved UI and a check for free space before copying starts. There have also been extensive performance improvements.
  • Another filemanager part of this release is PCMan, part of the LXDE lightweight desktop. The 1.1 release brings some UI improvements like disabling items which cannot act (like ‘copy’ on selected items) in the menu and toolbar, the option to ‘treat backup files as hidden’, the ability to change the colums in the Detailed List View and search engine support. Underlying improvements were made to stability and performance, as well as bringing new support for unmounting removable media without ejecting them and some other small changes.
  • hackweek10
  • In the browser area, the latest Firefox 18 is part of this release as well, bringing better performance and scaling of web content to openSUSE 12.3.
  • Platform:
  • This version brings us up to kernel 3.7.1, bringing a bunch of fixes and new features over the 3.4 release in openSUSE 12.2. New and improved features include:
  • support for metadata checksums and improved quota support in Ext4
  • I/O failure statistics, subvolume quotas, quota groups, snapshot diffs, faster fsync and the ability to disable copy-on-write on a per-file base in btrfs
  • userspace probes for performance profiling with tools like Systemtap or perf and a new “perf trace” tool modeled after strace.
  • Many improvements to networking. The TCP protocol performance work with support for the TCP “Fast Open” mode for both clients and servers and TCP Early Retransmit (RFC 5827) as well as inclusion of the a “TCP small queues” feature and a new network queue management algorithm designed to fight bufferbloat. Other low-level protocol enhancements include support for checkpointing and restoring TCP connections and a new tunneling protocol that allows to transfer Layer 2 Ethernet packets over UDP. New is experimental SMBv2 protocol support as well as stable NFS 4.1 and parallel NFS support and the ability to have safe swapping over NFS/NBD.
  • The kernel now allows for Android-style opportunistic suspend and has support for suspending to disk and memory at the same time which prevents these “yup, ran out of battery so now you lost data” annoyances with suspend-to-ram.
  • In the security area we see added support for signed kernel modules, the Intel “supervisor mode access prevention” (SMAP) security feature, VFIO, which allows safe access from guest drivers to bare-metal host devices and a sandboxing mechanism that allows to filters syscalls.
  • Other improvements include the ability to do SCSI over Firewire and USB, support for the PCIe D3cold power state; and the usual huge number of new and improved drivers.
  • LLVM, which was extensively described for Milestone 2, is updated to the final 3.2 release.
  • Other larger changes in this version unclude an update of gdb to 7.5 and postgresql got updated to version 9.2.
  • LibreOffice 3.6.x will be what ships with openSUSE 12.3 as we’d like to ensure availability of a dependable and a stable set of office tools for everyone, but 4.0 packages will be available and openSUSE 12.3 contains all the required dependencies for users to build 4.0 themselves if they like.
  • Distribution:
  • libzypp 12.6 got further improvements and bugfixes, while some more work in the package management area is coming for RC1 including an update to PackageKit and a solution to the PackageKit-blocking-zypper issues.
  • Note: as part of the SuSEconfig removal work, permissions now applies changes following installation or upgrade, to ensure new permissions are effective regardless of package installation order.

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 12.3 Milestone 1 (Nov 8, 2012)

  • Switched to libpng 1.5
  • binutils 2.23 (previous was 2.22)
  • gcc has been updated to 4.7.2 release
  • We are now shipping bison 2.6 and flex 2.5.37
  • Python 3.3 is now shipped (up from 3.2)
  • Mesa 9.
  • xf86-video-ati 6.98.1 (CHANGES??)
  • xf86-video-intel 2.20.12
  • We are now shipping the stable 3.6.3 kernel

New in openSUSE GNOME Live CD 12.3 Milestone 0 (Oct 3, 2012)

  • KDE is updated to 4.9.1 release
  • Glibc is updated to 2.16 release
  • Kernel is updated to 3.6.0-rc7
  • X.org updated to 1.13 release
  • All X.org video drivers are updated to latest stable release (or snapshot).
  • Mesa updated to upcoming v9 snapshot.
  • DRM libraries updated to 2.4.33 release
  • Qt updated to 4.8.2 release.
  • Emacs updated to 24.2 release.
  • OpenJDK updated to 1.7.0.6 release
  • Banshee media player is updated to 2.5.1 release.
  • zsh is updated to 5.0 release
  • SourceCodePro font from Adobe is now available among other new font packages.
  • Support for OPUS codec added via libopus
  • jpeg-turbo is now the default jpegv8 implementation, jpegv6 is dropped.