openSUSE 10.3 RC1 Debuts

OpenSUSE.org released yesterday the first release candidate of openSUSE 10.3 as it moves toward general public release on Oct 4.

True to its multi-desktop heritage, the 10.3 release candidate offers improvements to both GNOME and KDE, including the new GNOME 2.20 and an initial glimpse of the KDE 4 desktop.

GNOME 2.20, for example, features a new World Clock Applet (shown above), integration of search into the file chooser, an enhanced Evolution email client and calendar, enhanced image browsing capabilities, improved power management and battery use monitoring and the porting of GDK+ to YAST.

KDE 3 will be the default KDE interface in 10.3 but developers included an early glimpse at some compelling new features of the version 4 desktop including a new device framework known as Solid, a new user interface dubbed Plasma, a multimedia framework called Phonon and a new file manager dubbed Dolphin. Additionally, the porting of KDE to Qt 4 is another bonus for developers.

The beta was released in August.

The Release Candidate of the open source Linux distribution offer changes since that beta including Linux kernel 2.6.22.5, OpenOffice.org 2.3 , Virtualbox 1.5 and more than 500 bug fixes, openSuse.org web site says.