This screenshot gallery takes you through the installation process and basic desktop functions of the latest beta version of openSUSE, the community version of Novell's SUSE Linux distribution.
Over the past few months we've taken both Fedora and Ubuntu out for a spin, so when the openSUSE project announced the latest testing (or "beta") version of its Linux distribution had been released, we couldn't resist the temptation.
We booted the LiveCD Gnome-based version of openSUSE 11.1 beta 4 in a virtualised environment using VMWare Workstation. We then installed the operating system on a virtual hard disk to test it out.
We found openSUSE to be very fast in a virtualised environment compared to our previous Ubuntu experiences, but there's nothing scientific in this test.
The operating system is broadly friendly and easy to use, but some bugs remain — for example, we couldn't get the bundled version of OpenOffice.org to run.
openSUSE could also do with some polishing in places. For example, Ubuntu hides all terminal-style messages behind a pretty exterior during boot up, while openSUSE occasionally shows the user its inner workings.
(Credit: Renai LeMay/ZDNet.com.au)
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Oh ! very very nice