openSuSE 11.6 Milestone 6
For those who are looking for a conclusion to my recent blog post about openSuSE 11.4 development, there is generally good news. First, and most importantly, it does not appear that the various problems I wrote about have anything to do with the Novell sale/takeover or related activities. As can be seen from the comments to my "What's Up with openSuSE?" post, development and testing are still continuing normally, and many of the issues I was concerned about are happening because the openSuSE developers are taking their usual care and trying to make sure that each release is the best it can be.
One bit of good news already, 11.4 Milestone 6 was released a couple of days ago. However, the normal warnings for pre-release distributions still apply - it should only be downloaded and installed by experienced users, it is likely to still have significant bugs and rough spots (it does), and it should not be installed on a production system or a critical environment.
For those who are really interested in trying M6 and want install via Live USB stick rather than burning up another CD, I found an article in the openSuSE Wiki - SDB:Live USB stick which describes how to manually adjust the partition table after copying the ISO image to a USB stick. By using that procedure before trying to boot the stick, it all worked for me. Of course, the other obvious alternatives are to just burn it to a CD, which boots without problem, or simply wait for the Live USB problem to be fixed. I'll try to remember to mention it here when that happens.
For those who are waiting to hear how the support for the "new" bits of hardware in my Lenovo S10-3s are coming along: The ClickPad seems to work just fine now, which is nice. The Broadcom 4313 wireless adapter still doesn't work, but it comes a bit closer. It is recognized as needing the brcm80211 driver, and if you rename the firmware files in the /lib/firmware/brcm directory it actually seems to initialize successfully. But I still can't "Enable Wireless", so I can't get it to scan for available networks or connect to a network.
jw 28/1/2011