End of last week SUSE
announced the release 10.1 Beta9 and that they decided
to postpone the release candidate to iron out the last outstanding issues. I have high respect for this move and would like to congratulate them for making this undoubtedly hard and unpopular decision. I've been running Beta8 on my laptop since last week and things are looking very promising. I reported a number of bugs which almost all have been resolved in the meanwhile - from my perspective I would be happy if at least the following two bugs could be resolved before the release candidate is made:
- BUG#159595 - Can't change CDs when using YaST2 in KDE (it surprises me that nobody else seems to be stumbling over this one)
- BUG#159667 - Postfix SASL authentication fails with "no mechanism available" (this one was actually a problem with AppArmor preventing Postfix from accessing the required libraries)
For a change, I decided to not download the full ISO images but rather just got the
delta-iso files via BitTorrent. These deltas are all one needs to create the full ISOs - the download was blazingly fast, too. I had already deleted the Beta8 ISO images from my hard disk, but still had the previously burned Beta8 CDs. To generate functional Beta9 ISOs, I just needed to install the package
deltarpm. After inserting CD1 of Beta8 in the CD-ROM drive I used the following command to generate CD1 of the Beta9 CD set:
applydeltaiso /dev/hdc SUSE-Linux-10.1-beta8_beta9-i386-CD1.delta.iso SUSE-Linux-10.1-beta9-i386-CD1.iso
The process is a bit CPU-intensive, but resulted in a functional ISO image - even the MD5 checksum matched the one from the full ISOs available for download. I repeated this process for all 5 CDs and burned them over the Beta8 CDs (I have a set of 5 CD-RWs just for SUSE beta-testing). Let's see when I find a moment to perform another test installation... So far, the
list of most annoying bugs mostly mentions issues related to the package installer - this seems to be one of the sore spots of SUSE Linux 10.1... I hope they manage to beat it into shape in time.
