The openSUSE project is a community program sponsored by Novell. Promoting the use of Linux everywhere, this program provides free, easy access to openSUSE, a complete Linux distribution. The openSUSE project has three main goals: make openSUSE the easiest Linux for anyone to obtain and the most widely used Linux distribution; leverage open source collaboration to make openSUSE the world's most usable Linux distribution and desktop environment for new and experienced Linux users; dramatically simplify and open the development and packaging processes to make openSUSE the platform of choice for Linux developers and software vendors.
The development of openSUSE 11.4, which is expected to ship in March next year, launches today with the first milestone build: "openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 1 is available today for developers, testers and community members to test and participate in the development of openSUSE 11.4. Milestone 1 starts off openSUSE 11.4 development at a cracking pace with performance improvements in the package management network layer and version updates to major components. This milestone contains libzypp version 8.1, which has a new backend for HTTP and FTP package downloads. MultiCurl replaces the old MediaAria backend, and brings support for zsync transfers and better Metalink download support. Other major components that have received updates include X.Org 1.9, KDE 4.5 and GNOME 2.32.0 Beta 1." Read the rest of the release announcement. Download (mirrors): openSUSE-KDE-LiveCD-Build0715-i686.iso (667MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-GNOME-LiveCD-Build0715-i686.iso (665MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-KDE-LiveCD-Build0715-x86_64.iso (677MB, MD5, torrent), openSUSE-GNOME-LiveCD-Build0715-x86_64.iso (664MB, MD5, torrent).