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openSUSE is a community project, sponsored by Novell, to develop and maintain a general purpose Linux distribution. After acquiring SUSE Linux in January 2004, Novell decided to release the SUSE Professional product as a 100% open source project, involving the community in the development process. The initial release was a beta version of SUSE Professional 10.0 and as of January 2007 the current stable release is openSUSE 10.2.{{cite web | url=http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-announce/2006-12/msg00004.html | title=Release of openSUSE 10.2 | author=Michael Loeffler | date=December 7, 2006 | work=opensuse-announce mailing list | accessdate=2007-01-13 } -->

openSUSE provides, beyond the distribution, a web portal for community involvement. The community assists in developing openSUSE collaboratively with representatives from Novell by contributing code through the open Build Service, writing documentation, designing artwork, fostering discussion on open mailing lists and in Internet Relay Chat channels, and improving the openSUSE site through its wiki interface. It is one of Novell's stated goals to market openSUSE as the best, easiest distribution for all users.

Like most distributions it includes both a default graphical user interface (GUI) and a command line interface option; it allows the user (during installation) to select which GUI they are comfortable with (either GNOME or KDE), and supports thousands of software packages across the full range of open source development.

Features


openSUSE shares many features with SUSE Linux Enterprise offerings, for example:

* AppArmor: gives certain applications rights based on how they run and interact with the environment.
* YaST: a system management application
* Xen: virtualization software
* The KDE and GNOME desktop environments

Versions


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. One of the areas that developers focussed their efforts on in this release were the menus used to launch programs in both GNOME and KDE. This release also included version 2.0 of Mozilla Firefox, moved to ext3 as the default file system, included support for internal readers of Secure Digital cards that are commonly used in digital cameras, featured an improved power management framework that allows more computers to enter a suspended state rather than go through a lengthy shutdown-startup process and included improvements to the package management system.

Response


The openSUSE page on DistroWatch is consistently the second most frequently accessed of a comprehensive list of Linux distributions.
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